


Past Perfect Future Tense

by freneticfloetry



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Heartfelt Discussions About Tropes, M/M, Mutually Oblivious Pining, Time Travel Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 00:02:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19196851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freneticfloetry/pseuds/freneticfloetry
Summary: It happened. That they'd asked themselves how, when it's literally the least important part of this, he can chalk up to shock or shortsightedness or his own sheer stupidity. It's thewhythat actually matters, and he thinks he knows the answer to that. So the real question… is how to make it happen again.





	1. Tell Me a Story of How It Began

**Author's Note:**

> Picks up from "Do You Like Teeth?" (inclusive of the throne room conversation from "Escape from the Happy Place") and weaves its way through season three (and beyond? Sort of?). I was deep in the throes of post-finale fix it, and this just sort of happened. Magic may come from pain, but fic comes from being fucked over by canon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **TW** : the Depression Monster continues to be a dick.

In theory, this is nothing new. Eliot Waugh has been touching him since about five minutes after they first met, when he'd caught Quentin by the scruff of the neck and shoved him firmly at the rest of his life. And he'd just… never really stopped. Contact became a constant, pleasant and warm and familiar; the fond hand in his hair, the solid arm around his shoulders, the pull of passing fingers along his back.

But this… isn't. That.

He's hugged Eliot before. Not casually, the way they did everything else, but… consciously, carefully — laughing in the solace of the armory, lingering in the safety of the throne room. And almost always leaving Eliot behind. Their goodbye language.

So yeah. In theory, this is fitting.

El splays one hand wide across his chest, slides the other around the back of his neck, and Quentin turns his head to tuck into the space between like he belongs.

In practice, it's… something else entirely.

"You're overthinking this," Eliot says. With a cheek pressed tight to his collarbone, Quentin can almost feel the words before he hears them.

He blows out a breath, curling his hand into the curve where neck meets shoulder until he can count out a pulse with the back of his fingers. "Am I?"

Eliot hums, peering down into his face without pulling back. So close. All of him is, just, _so close_. "Beneath that truly tragic hat, I can see all the little gears spinning. You look like the elf who found Santa's stash of porn."

A laugh bubbles out of Quentin's throat, the one that only seems to make an appearance when he's wholly at home in his own skin.

The thing is, it's barely even a hug. They're just… pressed together and holding tight, pieces of one filling parts of the other until they fit. Like a puzzle.

Eliot's thumb sweeps slowly over the nape of his neck. "Nobody's even gonna get it."

Like muscle memory.

"But you can't _not_ ," Eliot says, palm pressed flat against his heart and leaving fingerprints behind. "Assuming we come out on the other side of this with magic and kingdom and asses intact, when will you ever actually have this chance again?"

Oh. Oh, shit.

The blink lasts barely a breath, just long enough for the flash of something to play out against the blank backs of his eyelids — sharing the same space, held in the same hands, watching tiny feet take their first steps.

This, whatever this is… it doesn't quite belong to them.

"I'm serious, Quentin, this is my serious face," Eliot says, with an expression that says _I am almost entirely serious and only a tiny bit fucking with you, so let's pretend that part doesn't exist, shall we?_ , and something in Quentin aches, sudden and sharp — all at once he knows that face better than he had a split second ago.

A _lifetime_ ago.

"El —"

" _Q._ On the off chance that it's escaped your attention, you are _literally_ the king of the world." When he presses his lips to the same spot along his hairline, sweet and soft and smiling, the memory of it is so much more than a moment old. "And if you don’t shout it from that fucking ship, I swear to god, you are dead to me."

 

 

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Practically every moment since has proven him _ridiculously_ fucking wrong.

His nose itches, his feet feel like lead, he's had to pee for at least twenty minutes. The ropes at his waist have just enough slack that he sways forward and slams back with the crest of every wave, while the ones at his wrists are tied tight enough that his all fingers are tingling. And then there's, well —

"Are you wearing women's pants?"

— the relentless part of him that's a raging dick.

Quentin rolls his eyes, head lolling back against the mast. "Oh good, we've reached the bottom of the barrel."

"Maybe I'm genuinely curious," the depression monster says, eyebrows up. The voice in his head, let loose and standing right in front of him.

"Maybe you're all out of ammo," Quentin snaps, "since I'm _strapped to the fucking ship_. Unless rope burn can open a vein or there's a very strategic splinter, I'm pretty sure death is off the table for today. But sure, Fillorian fashion fails. Bring it on."

"You get so cocky when you think you're being clever." His own eyes flick low and back again. "Without the brains or the balls back it up. But it's cute. That you think this is done."

"Whatever, asshole." He exhales, long and slow and only moderately tortured. "Still. Tied. To the boat."

"Yeah. Thanks for the captive audience." It wanders away from the edge, a walking shadow wearing Quentin's face. "You honestly think this is the bottom? This is a drop in the bucket. Alice, _Julia…_ That's barely the last two years. And that's _with_ magic. I haven't even touched the train wreck you were before."

Its tone sets his teeth on edge, flat and flippant and _so fucking sure_.

"Starting on the outside was kind of a copout. It's not like I'm telling you anything you don't already know. I mean…" It gestures in Quentin's general direction. "Look at you."

Quentin blinks up at the black sky, looking at nothing at all.

"What I should've done? Was start from the beginning."

"You want under my skin that bad, fine." He presses the pads of his middle fingers to each of his thumbs, just to deal with all the anxious energy. "I kept a niffin trapped in there for months, so. I think I can make it through you shit-talking our way back to Whitespire."

"Apples and oranges. Alice had your whole… relationship implosion and remedial dick to draw from, but." It shrugs. "Not exactly the full highlight reel. Me? I’ve got you at ten, when Mrs. Miller left you at the natural history museum because everyone on the bus forgot you even existed. And fourteen, when you jerked off to that sad cosplay fantasy of the same jock who’d shoved your head in a toilet. More than once. On both counts."

" _Jesus_ ," Quentin mutters, mouth twisting at the memory of Landon Fletcher in full-on Legolas.

He’s hated Halloween ever since. And kind of… the collective works of Tolkein, really.

"I’ve got you at six," it says, "when Karen dumped you on your dad’s doorstep because the new girlfriend couldn’t stand kids. I’ve even got you four new girlfriends later, when you realized it was Mommy who didn’t want you all along. Never have been all that quick on the uptake."

There’s a current coursing through Quentin's veins, crawling through the tissue and tendons to pool thick and heavy in his fingertips, until he can almost pretend the tingle there is ambient.

His hands trace a tut to mute the world, if only for a moment, but it's pointless on multiple levels. No magic known to man has never managed to silence this.

"Bringing it back won't help you," the voice says — firm, fully realized, almost flesh and blood. "There's a reason you're out here by yourself. They all want magic back, because they can't stand to be normal. But they'd deal, if they had to. You? Normal's not an option for you. Never has been, not with your fucked-up brain. You're worse than normal, you're… Ordinary."

"Stop it," he chokes.

"Nothing will ever make you special, Quentin. Not even magic." The voice snorts, shakes its head. "And you wonder why he doesn't want you."

All the breath leaves his lungs in a rush. The words hang in midair, echo. "Fuck you."

"Pass. Bored banging has its moments, but even Eliot could only take so much before he pawned you off on the first thing with a pulse. _Eliot Waugh,_ walking sex drive. Couldn't stop fucking you fast enough."

" _Bullshit._ " His fingers twist and flex and curl up tight, dig the night's missing moons from his skin. If he had any magic at all, the world would be on fire. "That's bullshit, he — we were…"

Happy. They'd been happy. The three of them, for a while, the two of them for so much longer. Until he'd been the only one left.

Quentin closes his eyes and conjures the warmth of his wedding — the solid length of Eliot at his side, the steadying hand on his arm that eased the shaking away, the sun-bright smile that tracked Arielle across the Mosaic.

 _"El, come on, you don't have to_ leave _—"_

_"Q, it's fine. We need supplies, I can take the jam into town. Two birds, one trip. And you get a bonus honeymoon." A hand at the bend of Quentin's shoulder, a kiss pressed to Arielle's temple. "You crazy kids go be blissful."_

He'd come back three days later, with a string of smoked meat, a silk ribbon for Arielle's hair, and a swathe of beard burn Quentin tried not to notice. And the world spun madly on. They'd had Teddy and lost Ari and found each other again, built something so full and good and _happy_ that it appeased a piece of magic itself.

The beauty of all goddamn life.

"You know, all this willful ignorance would be hilarious if it weren't so damn pathetic," the voice says, monotone, as if he’d voiced it all out loud. "Exactly what part of all that was his happily ever after? That he made you eat and mopped your tears and cleaned up every mess you made? That he raised your kid, when you could barely be bothered to ask about the one he never saw again?"

The wave of nausea hits so hard it seems to sway the actual ship. Quentin clenches his jaw as bile burns up his throat, half hoping he'll be sick — that he can purge every feeling that roils in the pit of his stomach, just heave it all onto the deck until the ugliness is gone.

He thinks of the Eliot who'd held him with one arm and their son with the other as they'd watched Arielle laid to rest, and the Eliot who'd helped him breathe through the bad brain days and come out himself on the other side, and the Eliot who'd worn his wedding ring until the day Teddy understood enough to ask, then slid it onto a length of silk alongside Arielle's and tucked them both away without a word.

_"Between you and me, little man, this is probably for the best." A whisper in the night to the bundle in El's arms, barely heard over Ari's whistling breath, but soft and sweet and already so enamored. "I know your Daddy didn't care either way, but I've always been better with boys."_

"The rest of it… well." It waves a hand. "I guess you'll never know, will you? Maybe pity was easier than boredom. Maybe sex with a desperate disaster was better than no sex at all. _Maybe…_ he just wasn't asshole enough to turn down the weepy widow with the hand wrapped around his dick."

The sound he makes comes from somewhere low and deep and hollow, like it's escaped from the place where his chest has cracked open.

"Fifty years in a two-room shack, and you actually thought that he'd want to be trapped. On a boat. With you. Be… _anywhere_ with you. That's about as desperate as it gets. It'd been like five minutes, he'd barely breathed free air."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Eliot got stuck with you for the rest of his life," it says, "and now he'd rather stay in Fillory with the fucking fairies than do it all over again."

"Just," Quentin stammers, swallows, sobs, " _stop_."

"The answer was never the lie you lived." It moves forward to stand before the mast, face as blank as its words are brutal. "It was everyone you love, dead and gone. It was you, left behind. Alone. You're the piece of the puzzle that gets buried and forgotten."

It fades back to the edge, every part of it eerily still while the wind whips Quentin's hair across his face in stinging little lashes, rips his tears away before they can fall.

"Quentin. How could I ever run out of ammo? Your entire existence is ammo."

The voice crosses its arms and watches him break and has the balls to look fucking _bored_.

"I’ve got two lifetimes' worth of bullets to choose from," it says. "Just pick one and pull the fucking trigger."

 

 

Poppy isn't exactly forthcoming with her plan for finding Victoria. Considering that her plan for dealing with the key had started with mass suicide and ended in death by goddamn dragon, Quentin's not sure he really wants to know, anyway.

The thing is, Poppy also talks a hell of a lot for someone who isn't actually telling him anything. And after talking Penny into helping and talking Alice off a ledge and his own subconscious talking through his every fucking failure, it's just, _too much_ , and he leaves her in the lounge with his computer, mumbling about another shower and stumbling up the stairs.

And Eliot is there. Suddenly, miraculously _there_ , like a mirage, at the other end of the hall. Kissing Fen goodbye.

The sight makes him freeze, fingers still wrapped around the railing. In his head, he's been with this man for twice as long as he's even been alive. Been half of a whole, the two of them the center of every permutation, bound together as the whole world reshaped itself around them.

In reality, Eliot has a wife. A child. Has a family all his own, one that does not include Quentin Coldwater.

 _And you wonder why he doesn't want you_ , the voice says again. This time, at least, it comes from the shadowy space in his head where it's lived for as long as he can remember.

Fen beams up at Eliot and ducks back inside, closing the door behind her, and Eliot spends a few crawling seconds with his hands braced on the jamb and his head tipped back to the ceiling, then spins and stops short at the sight of Quentin just… standing there, staring like an idiot.

"Hey," he says, surprised. Weary, but walking forward. "You're here."

"You're leaving," Quentin says flatly. Which is fine — there were only two ways it could've come out, really, and he'd rather be detached than pathetic.

Then he moves, closer, and can't quite help himself, can't keep the hitch from his voice. "Already?"

They meet in the middle, Eliot's mouth pressed somewhere between smiling and sadness.

"Much as I'd love a good gin-soaked return to simpler times, I have a date with a last-ditch power grab. Spare a prayer for all my precious extremities." His tongue darts out over his lower lip, and he hooks a thumb over his shoulder toward his bedroom. "They should be good here for a bit. Turns out there isn't a teenager on this or any other planet who can resist the siren call of Snapchat, and some Todd who shall remain nameless has given Fen a _fidget spinner_."

Quentin almost laughs, almost, but the dry wit and disdain is drowning in such unapologetic affection that it makes him swallow the sound. Makes him remember the twelve years that Eliot spent with a band of silver filigree still circling his finger, binding him to a woman who hadn't yet been born, a woman Quentin had barely known.

_The peal of her laughter pulls his head from the sand, draws his eyes down to the water._

_"Eliot." A warning, hesitant, hopeful, as she's led steadily through the shallow._

_"Fuck fear, trust me." It's almost a command, like the king he'd been once — fierce and fond and full of wry amusement, walking backward with her hands held in his. "I've compromised on a lot since we've been here, honey, but I refuse to live in a world where wide-eyed gingers named Arielle do not know how to swim."_

"You okay?"

He blinks up into Eliot's eyes, watches the weariness wipe itself away.

"Q?"

And just like that, all the words in him that had dried up and died want to spill from his mouth on one big breath, meant for Eliot's ears alone.

"I, um, yeah," he says, but the stammering only amplifies the curious confusion etched on Eliot's face.

Quentin thinks of everything he wants to say, everything he _can't_ say standing here in the middle of the hallway, surrounded by closed doors with people behind them — Eliot's wife and Eliot's child and Eliot's beautiful hurricane of a best friend and fucking _Todd_ — until, apparently, he thinks too long.

" _Okay_ ," Eliot singsongs. Then he rolls his eyes, reaches out, and…

This, too, they've done before. Simply taken hold of each other and _tugged_ , half out of friendship and half on blind faith, until one of them was exactly where the other needed them to be. The last time he can remember, Margo's voice had followed them out, full of feigned annoyance, and whatever sentence she'd started before the hand closed around his wrist had ended in _for fuck's sake, El, just get him a goddamn leash_.

But Eliot's hand makes contact and moves, slides down his forearm and right past his wrist. He locks their palms together, his left in Quentin's right, laces long fingers through his in a way he's done about a thousand times. Tens of thousands, maybe.

Just… not in _this_ life.

It's kind of overkill for the ten feet it takes to cross to Quentin's room, but he breathes deep and holds on tight and lets himself be led. He realizes, belatedly, that there's still a friggin' _cloak_ strapped across Eliot's shoulders — it catches the air as they move, Quentin so close behind that the ends bat and brush against his legs.

Eliot pulls him inside and kicks the door closed behind them. When Quentin turns, their hands are still tangled together.

"I'm sorry," he blurts, because it seems like the safest place to start. "Um… about Benedict."

"Yeah," Eliot says, distracted, "so begins the search for a new least annoying Pickwick. Q…" He shuffles a step closer, squeezing his fingers then slipping them free. "What's going on with you? I thought Alice… is she not okay?"

It's so far from his headspace, in subject and implication, that it throws Quentin for a loop. "What?"

" _Alice_." Eliot raises an eyebrow. "Blonde, brainy, 'bout yea high. ODed on borrowed magic?"

"That's not…" Quentin presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, smears the backs of his fingers across the lids. "Alice is fine. Will be. Fine. Honestly, Julia's handling it, I. With the quest, and that fucking key, and… _everything_ —" He shakes his head. "I can't. Right now."

Eliot has been nodding since somewhere around _Julia_. "Okay," he says, "okay, I get that." He closes his hands over Quentin's shoulders, runs them down to his elbows and back again. "So then what's… all this?"

They'd stumbled onto it accidentally, about four months in, the morning Eliot stuck a candle into a tear of bread and woke him with a _happy birthday_ , and the passage of time and futility of the puzzle had hit him all at once. The first bad brain day in their little pocket of Fillory, unlike any he'd ever had before.

He'd chalked it up to the opium in the air, a factor he'd hoped might help but had only made his brain break in brand new and exciting ways — the _drift_ of it, the feeling of fragmentation, of floating away in pieces his hands could not catch.

From that first day, Eliot's hands had been an anchor, grounding him in place, grabbing all the fractured parts and fusing him back together. But _this_ — the perfect pressure, the movement timed to slow the beat of his breath… this had come later.

"What's 'everything,' Quentin?"

Eliot's eyes on him are as soft as his voice but as steady as his hold, as squarely focused as they always are. Have ever been.

 _You were_ , he wants to say. _We were._

"How much do you know about stable time loops?"

The hands on his arms stutter and stop, and Eliot half-hums a surprised little laugh, mouth quirking at one corner. "This is the part where I say 'a shitload' and you know I mean 'nothing whatsoever.'"

"Right," Quentin says. "Um. Okay, so… time travel is like, uh, a hugely imperfect concept. We know it exists, obviously, that it's a real thing, but. There are different… methods, I guess. In theory. When Jane, she uh, when she created the loop to stop The Beast, it was from a fixed point in time with a specific outcome in mind. On the surface, your basic Groundhog Day scenario." His hands are moving so much that Eliot's can't hold on, and he steps back, just out of his orbit, to give the rambling room to breathe. "But she had to, to reset it each round, to trigger it, or else time would move forward as usual, regardless of, you know, whether or not the whole objective had actually been met. That's, it's why we had to stop Martin this time around, because. She wasn't alive to reset us again."

Quentin pauses to make sure Eliot's still following. His brows have pulled together but his eyes are still alert, and he's wearing that face that screams _I'm with you but also what the fuck_.

Which is… honestly, kind of the best he could've expected.

"Great," he says. "So we know that those loops split into alternate timelines, that there are other versions of us that exist. Existed. It's… tricky, uh, not all of those versions died in every loop? I mean I, I _conjured Alice_ from timeline twenty-three. But us, all of us, we're… echoes, or something, like the, the _residue_ of time magic. Think, um, Spock Prime. In the alternate original series."

Eliot shakes his head. "That reference is above my geek grade."

"It's like, hm." Quentin screws up his face, grasping. "Like erasing something with a shitty pencil that leaves a bunch of smudges behind. Better?"

"Sure," Eliot says, looking anything but, "we're… time smudges."

"No, we're… Not _us_ us, the other versions of us. The ones who never killed The Beast but didn't actually die trying. The point is, we're not the cause. We're the consequence. _Jane Chatwin_ was the one who went back in time. The rest of the multiverse was just… along for the ride."

"She's Bill Murray," Eliot says.

"She's Bill Murray. But here's the thing. That kind of time travel, the, the temporal, Groundhog Day kind?" Quentin takes a deep breath, blows it back out again. "It isn't… actually. _Possible_."

It hangs there for a moment, hovering, Eliot's tongue trapped between his teeth. The sight sparks something warm and bright in his chest — this routine, the rhythm of Quentin's questioning exposition and Eliot's answering reflection, had been before, has always been, for as long as they've had each other.

After struggling through this stretch of time with a brain full of doubt and a heart full of elsewhere, this is a moment that feels firmly, completely theirs.

"And yet," Eliot finally offers, "here we stand, the human equivalent of control-alt-delete. We're Magicians, Q. The vast majority of the Muggle world doesn't believe that _we're_ possible."

"But it's not _about_ belief," Quentin counters. "Magic is _science_. Right? I mean yeah, it's fueled by energy, but it's _based_ on, on elements and circumstances and probabilities. _Rules_." The weight of the words has made him restless — he's moving now, just short of pacing in the space between Eliot's body and the bed, which… isn't very much space at all. "And according to those rules, the explanation of time magic that we were given, the way we were told that this worked, _cannot_ , Eliot, it can't be done. Science says so. _Einstein_. Says so, and he was the greatest meta-comp magician that ever lived. The only way, the _only way_ that actual time travel is possible without paradox… is through a stable time loop."

He stops — his words, his movement, possibly his breath — and the silence stretches again, a beat too long, before Eliot presses a finger to his own mouth.

"Okay," he says, "I'm as big a fan of the dramatic pause as the next former theater kid, but I feel like you've forgotten my earlier 'shitload' was sarcasm."

Quentin smiles despite himself. The general sentiment may be the same, but Eliot is still the only person in his life who has never once reacted to the process-and-reset breaks in his rambling with annoyance or frustration or _just spit it out, already_.

"Sorry," he says, and it somehow sounds like _thank you_. "What I'm saying is, the idea that Jane reset the loop until she made the _one change_ that led to us killing The Beast, that's… it's bullshit, El. In a stable time loop, there's no changing…" His hands spread wide. " _Anything_. Every event in your past has to have happened in order for you to become your present self. Go back and, at best, you end up exactly where you started, you just got to relive it all again. Worst-case? The act of going back in time is literally what causes the thing you're trying to prevent, and you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's like the, the moral of every half-decent time travel movie."

Eliot's mouth opens, his face full of thoughtful surprise. "Like 12 Monkeys."

It's a hitch in his train of thought, like a record scratching, but one that keeps him from spiraling wildly off track.

_The pages crumple in his fist, bright with color and blurring at the edges. Eight years' worth of work scrawled in thick swirls of chalk, undone by a brief lapse in childproofing._

_"I —" A slow shuffle through a pile of patterns — spirals and chevrons, poor attempts at paisley, El's brief obsession with Buffalo check. "Maybe… I can make them out, I, I'm not… I don't know what to do here, Eliot. I don't even know where the hell to start."_

_Long fingers on his back, warm lips in his hair. "Then it's a free day. And we'll take it from there." The fingers press, then pass him their son, the precious weight of what matters most. "Okay, Teddy Bear. Why don't we show Daddy that there's no problem a good pinstripe can't fix?"_

"Exactly like 12 Monkeys."

It's too soft, too fond for four throwaway words about a viral dystopian future. Even for him.

Quentin scrubs a palm over his cheek, shoves his hair behind one ear. "We know the loop picked up right before I came to Brakebills, that that was the starting point. But that wasn't the point of origin, that's not when it was triggered. _Something_ _happened_ beyond that point, something in the future, to make Jane manipulate time as a fix. And whatever that was, whatever happened in the original timeline that was so fucked up she had to go backward instead of move forward… if we really had changed that, if we _had_ fixed it? Once that point in time rolled around again, she wouldn't need to start the loop in the first place. So she, she _wouldn't_. And it would, just. Never exist."

"Right, but… she wasn't _alive_ to get to that point this time, anyway." Eliot licks his lips, looks away. When he speaks again, his voice has lost its fullness. "She didn't even live long enough to see The Beast get ganked."

Unbidden, unwanted, Quentin imagines Eliot in the hall outside the clean room, alone, with Fogg down and Mike dead and whatever was left of Jane Chatwin. With the blood of one of them on his hands, and the weight of all of them on his shoulders.

He never had talked about it, not really. Not even in Fillory.

Quentin wants to reach out, wants to touch him, but he's ramble-walked himself to the foot of the bed, out of arm's reach, and doesn't dare move any closer at the moment. Even without the Mosaic, he's been with Eliot long enough to know that the man turns feral when cornered.

"Yeah, that's," — a little too loud — "sort of the key to all of this. Pun… fully fucking intended. Jane, _that_ Jane… I don't think she started this at all."

It takes a second, but Eliot's eyes snap back to him again. "Then who the _fuck_ —"

"The Watcherwoman," Quentin says, shrugging. "The only version of Jane Chatwin that still exists."

" _Sure_ , let's go with that." Eliot groans, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "My brain hurts, Q. My actual brain."

Quentin thinks back to his only conversation with The Watcherwoman, the cyclical, nonsensical explanation of how she'd come to be. "Yeah," he mutters, "she has that effect on people. Um… look, I, I wish I could tell you that that's the most… brain painful part of it —"

"But wait," Eliot says, falsely bright, " _there's more_."

He leans back to the door, both arms crossed over his chest, one ankle slung over the other, screaming _lay it on me_ with the length of his whole body. Quentin knows that body almost better than his own, knows all the ways it tenses and shutters and locks down tight, and the whisper of _brace for impact_ is louder than anything.

He sinks down to the mattress and pulls his legs up, shapes himself into something familiar.

"Um," he starts, testing the water, "so you know how Julia and I are actually, like, _in_ the books?"

Eliot hums his assent. "The Witch and The Fool." He shifts, adjusting the armor. Almost begrudgingly, his voice is a wash of warmth. "You might've mentioned it, once or twice. A month."

"Fuck off," Quentin says, without heat, on a breath, because the jab is easy and joking back is even easier and he just might break if he doesn't. It's the first time since Whitespire, since peaches and plums and _I love you, but_ , that Eliot's acknowledged the Mosaic at all. "I guess I was so preoccupied with, I don't know, Fillory fanboy flailing, I never really stopped to think about… _how_. How that happened. How it even _could_ , when we'd never made it that far before. And then _we_ , um…"

His eyes cut up to Eliot, who hasn't moved an inch. But his jaw is set and his face is carefully blank, eyes so guarded Quentin may as well have said the words.

"This whole time, I'd assumed that the watch was basically a… a _time machine_ , and I figured maybe the key was something separate, like its own ontological paradox —"

"What _whole time_?" Eliot cuts in. "Baby, it's been like a _week_."

Something stabs around in Quentin's ribcage, sharp and searching. Not just because it's been fifty years, and even longer for him, but because as close as they are, as many lines as they've blurred, Eliot — _this_ Eliot, in their here and now — has never, ever called him that.

He doesn't even seem to realize the slip, the same way he hasn't caught all the subtle shifts in contact there've been. Since.

Quentin squeezes his eyes shut, curls his hands into the hems of his pants. "Fillory… those books were written _decades_ ago. But Jules and I were always the people who saved Jane, Eliot, just like _we_ were always the ones who solved the Mosaic. And I've been trying to figure out how both of things can be true when we're the _fortieth_ incarnations of the exact same people who never did either one of them, and… Then I realized."

He stops, swallows. Makes himself look.

"We're _not_ , El. This is the original timeline."

It lands like a bomb, heavy, explosive, sucking all the air out of the room.

" _Oh_ , for —" Eliot swipes a hand down his face, his voice muffled in its heel. "You know, when I pulled you in here, I was not prepared for a Very Special Episode On Time Travel. I would've pre-gamed with peyote."

Quentin throws up a hand, helpless. "That's the only way this makes sense, any of it. Damnit, just…" His mouth twists around the bitter taste on his tongue, brain grasping at words in vain and latching on to a memory. " _Logic this_ with me for one second."

There are few things in the world Eliot hates more than having his own words turned back on him, and words from their life at the Mosaic might be worse. For a split second, just the space of a breath, Eliot's eyes could burn through his very bones.

He swallows down the apology bubbling up his throat. "Time travel," he says, gentling his voice instead, "didn't rewrite the Fillory books. And to get us there, El, our lives had to happen _exactly_ as they did. Not just stopping The Beast, I had to… _fall into a fucking fountain_ for me and Jules to be in Fillory at the right moment in 1942. For us to get the key to Jane, the same key she used to _start_ all of this, we had to kill Ember. We had to lose magic. And for that key to come back to us, for the quest to continue, for… for the two of us to still be here _at all_? Jane Chatwin had to die."

Eliot shakes his head. "That was…" His arms tighten across his chest, less crossed over each other than hugging himself. "We don't even know what that was."

There's an echo of Eliot inside Quentin's head, both flippant and reassuring. _It was an alternate timeline, and one we never have to live now._

But that had been before the memories.

He rocks off the bed and moves to the desk, digs the book from the bottom of his bag. That the next chapter's pages are still blank, after days of sinking in the void of his depression, is just insult on top of injury.

His fingers find the illustration — the knight's daughter, the checkerboard tiles, the shimmer of reflection — and the closing words of chapter three.

"At the center of the finished Mosaic was a golden key," he reads, as even as he can be. "The girl — now an old woman — took it, and when she touched the handle, became a young woman again. She was granted the gift of youth while maintaining the wisdom of old age. And with this powerful new weapon, she continued on her quest." He snaps the book closed, tosses it to the bed. "Guess we should've paid more attention to the fine print."

Eliot snorts out a laugh, utterly without humor. "Why does it _matter_ , Quentin?" he says, somewhere between exasperated and exhausted. "We have the key, we didn’t wither and die, I'd call that a win. What's the point of dissecting it now?"

"I — Are you… are you serious right now? It fucking _matters_ because…" Quentin's mouth moves without sound, trying to find words that won't sound as desperate as he feels. "It wasn't an _alternate timeline_ , and it, it wasn't… I don't know, some pocket dimension we both happen to remember. It was our _lives_ , Eliot. It was real. We lived it. And then the quest brought us back. But it was always meant take a lifetime, El. _That_ was the point."

Eliot pulls in a breath, blows it back out again. The sound of it shakes coming and going. "This is. _A lot_. I mean, you basically just defended a thesis on the mind fuckery of time magic. When did you even… You're _sure_ about all this?"

_Two hands conduct a symphony, graceful and glowing, magic making music out of nothing at all. It's the third nightmare this week, and the echo of it in the walls has sent them all to the daybed, to fresh air and open space and a serenade under the stars._

_"With so little to be sure of…"_

_Teddy is a comma curled on El's chest, as close to the sound as he can get without crawling inside. Sondheim, tonight._

_"If there's anything at all…"_

_Warmth skims the back of his hand, weaves their fingers as his eyes slip closed. As he breathes, and listens, and lets the sound of that voice fill his lungs._

_"If there's anything at all, I'm sure of here and now and us together…"_

Quentin nods woodenly, thinking of fresh dirt folding over their quilt, of the first night he'd cooked for one person and combed his own hair and climbed into a bed that felt too big and too cold and too empty.

"I had a lot of time to myself there, at the end," he says quietly. "Wasn't really much else to do."

He shrugs a little, tucking his thumbs into the worn edges of his sleeves, and Eliot tilts his head to one side, his face sliding into something soft and fond and warm, and the moment folds in on itself, feels like everything they'd been before and after and always and never again. Like he could sink to the floor in some stupid position that Eliot would mirror with impossible grace, and they could just _stay there_ , together, El's hand in his hair and his head on El's shoulder, until the world reminded them that time was still moving.

But Eliot slides off the door and straightens, hands dropping to clench at his sides. He takes a slow step, another, a third, then sways forward and back again, as if his legs won't let him come any closer.

"So," he says, expectant, his eyes wide and wet and cautious, "if that life was real, Q, if we actually lived it, then that means… what, exactly?"

A million thoughts fly through Quentin's head, beating wings made of lazy days and lullabies and the life they'd built together, until his mind is a hurricane of _you_ and _us_ and _please please please_. But whatever it is that Eliot wants, whatever it is he's asking for, whatever's making him _hope_ as hard as he's trying so hard not to… it isn't Quentin. That much, at least, has been made pointedly, painfully clear.

He pushes past the ache to the eye of the storm, latches onto the only thing he's certain that Eliot will want to hear.

"Brea had a baby," he says, softly. "After you… She had a little girl. Ella."

Their first grandchild, all fiery hair and fearlessness. From the very first moment he'd held her, she'd shamelessly loved Eliot best.

"I think maybe I was waiting. I only got to see her once." He takes another breath, tries to will it into something steady. Stronger. When it won't obey, he tries joking instead, mumbling to cover the break. "Jesus, with our luck, our grandkids' grandkids inherited your thing for showtunes and my shitty voice."

Feet away, what feels like miles, Eliot stands still and unblinking, his answering expression so beautiful and terrible and grateful and destroyed that it almost hurts to look at him. Quentin takes a step toward him, reaching into thin air.

"El," he says, "it means that… that somewhere in Fillory, we have a family. _Teddy's_ family."

Eliot nods, his throat working, his mouth curving into a sweet, shaky smile. But the spark of hope behind his shining eyes flickers and sputters and then goes out.

"Next quest," he says, tongue tracing over his lower lip. "I should go."

Quentin stumbles forward as he fades back, both of them reaching in the same direction. " _Eliot —_ "

"I'll catch you later, Q." Then he's gone, turned the knob and through the door before Quentin can cross the distance, the fucking cloak swirling dramatically behind him.

Belatedly it occurs to Quentin that, for someone who's just been handed a fully-grown daughter he doesn't even know, _have an undiscovered branch of your family tree_ might not have been the best way to go. But if that's the case, if that's really the problem, he can't imagine what else Eliot could've been asking for.

He blows out a breath, dragging both hands down his face.

And all at once, Eliot is back. Drawing him in, folding him close, solid and warm and familiar. Beneath his feet, the ground stops swaying.

"Um —"

"Just… shut up," Eliot mutters into his hair. "I'm holding a bunch of fairy fetuses hostage and you're headed off to play chicken with dragons and the goddamn Library. Better odds have killed us both before."

Their goodbye language, still louder than words. Quentin tucks his face into Eliot's chest, grabs the cloak in both fists and holds tight. For once, the voice in his head isn't even his.

_With so little to be sure of in this world, we had a moment…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lullaby Eliot sings to Teddy is from "Anyone Can Whistle." And the passage Quentin reads is actually from The Tale of the Seven Keys, at least according to the frame I capped, contrast corrected, and transcribed.


	2. Show Me the Point of Departure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not intend for this to be a 10k chapter, but here, have a 10k chapter. Hope you enjoy.

The bunny, all copper and chestnut tipped in rich, velvety black, crawls into Quentin's lap just as he's working his way to full-on panic, clutching the fifth key in a fist mostly gone numb.

_NOT DEAD. LOVE, ELIOT._

" _Fuck_ ," he chokes, then scrambles to catch the thing before it can hop back to Fillory with frantic one-word relief as its message. He brings it to his chest and holds it close, stroking the dark streak between its ears and trying to remember how the hell to breathe. Then a second, sleek and steel grey everywhere but its snow-white belly, drops front and center on the coffee table.

Quentin braces for the bad news portion of the proceedings _,_ because the good never comes without a _but_ , and the new bunny crosses to the couch and perches on his knee, as if he isn't paying close enough attention.

_BOAT CAN FLY, BITCHES._

If his laughter is a little manic — and maybe a little maudlin — the bunnies don't seem to mind.

 

 

"And we're sure we can't, like, send a small army of bunnies?"

Margo folds her hands together over the length of Eliot's legs in her lap, a gesture that might be meaningless for anyone else but, coming from her, kind of makes Quentin fear for Josh's life.

She'd been almost appreciative when they'd returned from Whitespire with the sixth key's location, if not the key itself — he'd explained that Josh's secret stash of 'see other worlds' had revealed it suspended at the apex of the Fairy Realm's throne room, and Margo had tilted her head and said _well shit, who knew Hoberman would actually be useful?_ — but it seems like the good will is nearly gone.

"They can only carry four words at a time," she says now. "It'd take ten of them just to ask Julia when the fuck she joined forces with the fairy horde."

"That'd take maybe three, max."

Margo smiles, razor sharp. "Not the way I'd ask."

It's always a little tempting for him to object — even after they'd killed The Beast and robbed a bank and banded together to get magic back, Jules is far from Margo's favorite person. But the grudge goes back even further, to the stretch of days after the Scarlotti Web, after his dad's diagnosis, when they'd drink and she'd hover and he'd wish out loud that he could just call his oldest friend. Margo hates nothing more than things that fuck with her people, and the lingering animosity is simply staking her claim, as loud as an _I love you_.

The bunnies had been one thing. But Quentin looks at the two of them now — Eliot sprawled artfully across the sofa, Margo making every seat a throne, both brilliant and beautiful and _breathing_ — and is still so fucking grateful he could cry.

Josh polishes off the last of his horse salami, shaking his head. "I don't know, guys."

"We need someone to slip past the patrols to the portal tree," Alice says, patient but prickly, gesturing to the piece of parchment with four mostly-familiar faces. "That can't be any of the rest of us."

"And it's hardly your first solo mission," Eliot adds. "Or have you forgotten the time you volunteered to roofy an entire rebel encampment?"

Josh snorts. "I think you have a very loose definition of 'volunteered.'"

Eliot smirks. " _I_ think the nymph-shaving spoils of that particular endeavor negate whatever 'woe is me' routine you're trying to pull right now."

"Okay," Margo says, "I'm gonna stop this right there before the rulers come out. We have fairy-shaped bullshit to deal with. And as someone intimately familiar with one of the dicks in question, Josh, this is not the hill you want to die on."

"I don't want to die _at all_ ," Josh exclaims. "Hence the objection! Can't we just get Julia to come to us?"

"Not so much," Quentin says, wincing. "Yeah, Tick's hunting for the four of us, but. After Julia's, um…"

"Shadeless reign of talking tree terror?" Eliot offers, and Quentin sweeps out an open hand in silent _that._

"She's pretty much at the top of the whole planet's shit list," he says. "Look, we're the only ones on the… the _wanted poster_ , or whatever." It's ridiculous in general and especially ridiculous to say out loud, but there isn't really a better way to put it. "The actual crowned kings and queens of Fillory. I really don't think there's anyone looking for you, Josh."

"Sure, until I show up in town, Tick decides that any old child of Earth will do, and I'm suddenly held hostage at… _serrated spoon-point_. I for one would like to hear other options from the safety of the ship in the sky."

And with that, the fragile thread of Margo's fraying patience snaps.

"You know what," she says, shoving El's feet to the floor to stand, "Eliot got hunted by cannibals. Penny got trapped in the Underworld. Quentin got mindfucked by his asshole of an id, and I got to squash _my own goddamn eyeball_. None of this shit has been _safe_ , not even the circle jerk karaoke that saved your ass in the first place." She stares him down, and even with one eye, it's legitimately terrifying. "So you have exactly two options. You can either grow some ovaries and get this shit done, or you can bow out with your dick between your legs. But let's be clear here, Hoberman. Whichever way this goes? You're gonna get the fuck off my flying ship."

The Muntjac rumbles ominously around them, all the reinforcement she needs, and Eliot reaches out to trail a hand down her arm. "Easy, Bambi."

"Just saying. You want to quest, _fucking quest_." She drops dramatically back to the sofa with a scowl, stretches satin-clad legs over Eliot this time. "We actually managed to press pause on the impending invasion, and this flaketastic fuckery is destroying my diplomatic high."

Alice pinches her brows together, mouth pursing. "How _did_ you get the Lorians and the Floaters to stop their advance on Fillory? You're not exactly in a position to negotiate with any kind of authority."

"You're not wrong." Eliot's fingers trace figure eights over Margo's ankle, his voice thoughtful on the surface and cagey just below in a way that makes Quentin want to fidget. "Which is why we negotiated as we always have. With extreme cunning, and very little dignity."

"Then you… what, begged?"

"No, sweetie," Margo says, smirking through Alice. "We _bribed_."

Eliot's answering flinch is so small Quentin might have imagined it. "I wouldn't call it bribery, per se."

"Fine. We _bargained_."

"We proposed an alternative," Eliot amends, "to put a pin in any war games currently afoot. Something mutually beneficial for all parties."

"Speak for yourself," Margo snorts. "You're the only one who got dicked down as part of the peace treaty proceedings. I got trapped in a room with Mommy fucking Dearest. And a lot of the feelings there are mutual, El, but 'beneficial' is not even close to the first thing that comes to mind."

There's a sound bouncing between Quentin's ears — faint but shrill, and constant, like the whistle of an oncoming train, or the wail of an approaching siren.

He shouldn't be surprised. They've returned to the lives they lived before, where Eliot has bonds and ties and a wedding ring he's still wearing. Where he has not only the specter of an unborn baby and the shell of a grieving wife, but the shadow of a fiancé waiting in the wings.

They'd talked about Idri, early on in their time at the Mosaic — Eliot had told him, fondly, about the man he was, noble and witty, charming and intelligent and _good_ — but all he can conjure in this particular moment is the single conversation they'd had at Whitespire, with Eliot in the throes of wedding planning and Quentin in the depths of drunken mourning, when he'd poured them both more wine and waxed poetic about his _hot as fuck_ husband-to-be. _Fen is… Fen, and god knows that could be infinitely worse,_ he'd said, _but I might actually get to spend the rest of my functional dick years doing more than lying back and thinking of Fillory_.

This should come as no surprise at all, but the chill in his bones still makes him shiver.

"So, wait," Josh starts, his near-miss with Margo seemingly forgotten, "you really —"

"Took one for the team, in every sense of the word." She slides down the curved arm of the sofa, settling in and winking her only eye at Alice. "Guess we found the best position for negotiation after all."

Alice sniffs and squirms and looks down at her shoes, and Josh, still half-high and forever testing the limits of decency, looks openly curious and more than a little impressed. But Eliot, shaking his head a bit and biting at the inside of one cheek, looks like he regrets ever bringing _dignity_ into it.

"That's not…"

"What? The concept of sound traveling can't be news to you, El. And those were not the vocal stylings of a man on top."

"Oh, fuck me," he half mutters, half groans, and Margo spreads her arms wide.

"Kinda making my point for me, baby," she says, and shrugs. "Honestly, I think the soundtrack is what sold it. Stone Bitch was on the fence for a while, like full-on silent treatment. It really helped for her to hear just how _eagerly_ Loria agreed to our little offer."

_The moan rumbles through the thick air inside, echoed in the crack of thunder out._

_"I'd say you're getting too good at that, but frankly it'd be counterproductive."_

_Two fingers retreat and then three advance again, twist into heat and slick and softness. The words are admirably even, as measured as they can be, but the leg curled over his shoulder shakes with each exhale._

_A laugh bounces breath back to the lips it just left, skin-warm where they're sucking a bruise into the hollow of one hip. "So what you're basically saying is that you taught me too well."_

_"That… hadn't actually occurred to me, but — ah, baby,_ fuck _— now that you mention it…"_

_An answering hum, half-lost in the steady strum of rain. "You sure it's your ego you want stroked right now?"_

_His fingertips find what they've been searching for, skimming like stones across the surface, until shoulders press back to the bed and hungry hands are reaching, reaching, reaching, until that voice breaks through the storm like sunlight._

_"Get up here and fuck me, Coldwater."_

"Can we not?" Quentin says quietly. "I mean, I, I don't see how any of this is relevant. Or _helping_."

" _Please_ , Q, you're not seriously calling anybody out on bedroom baggage. As if whatever" — she gestures broadly between him and Alice — " _all_ _this_ is about didn't start with you banging Dorothy the dragon stalker." His mouth drops open to sputter something that sort of sounds like _who_ and _how_ and _what are you even talking about_ , and she tilts her head before he can start making any actual sense. "Oh, honey, don't even. Most folks get an afterglow. You get a shroud of vaguely satisfied shame. But the fact that you fucked her after she literally handed you the 'kill yourself' key? Means, once all this is over, we need to have a serious conversation about your self-worth."

Quentin blinks in its wake, whip-fast wit delivered one drawn-out, deliberate word at a time. It's not that he hasn't been on the lash end of it before, it's that the impact still stings this much.

"This isn't a _joke_ , Jesus," he blurts, and bats away the ricochet of _but it truly is, Quentin_. "We're… trying to restore magic to the entire universe. Can we just, can we focus on the quest, here?"

"And _we_ just saved Fillory from a fucking world war," she spits back. "Can we revel for two goddamn seconds?"

"Not when your idea of reveling is… _whatever_ the hell this is."

"Margo." Eliot eyes are locked somewhere south of hers, unfocused. One long hand curls around her calf, clings, and his mouth pulls into a tight, close-lipped line that tries to be a smile and fails spectacularly. "Enough."

She opens her mouth on a breath, that big brown eye flitting back and forth between them, and Quentin sees it, then — the flicker of uncertainty, sparking like flint. It's a side of her that rarely surfaces, rarely needs to, when she's the best kind of hunter: the kind that only means to hurt people on purpose. Kill shots are all she ever takes, her safety where and when she points her weapon.

But this is Margo in the dark. This is the realization that she's _missed something_ , something vital, and hit a target she never actually aimed for.

He looks at Eliot, and Eliot can't look back. Won't.

She doesn't know.

The whole conversation looks different in that light — means that it was never about calling them out, or rubbing in his rejection, or just plain getting under Alice's skin. It was Margo at her basest level, either building up her best friend or baring all her teeth to protect him, no matter who she has to bury or tear to shreds in the process. Even the ugliness of that Poppy-fueled insight was just her twisted way of defending his virtue. Because Eliot — _Eliot_ , who tells her _everything_ — hasn't told her this.

Of course, it also means that her throwaway concern there at the end, brusque and brutal as it may have been, was entirely genuine. And probably something they'll be revisiting later, whether Quentin particularly wants to or not.

Her gaze settles on Eliot, shrewd and searching, and the spark solidifies into something harder.

She may not know the story, but she sure as hell knows he has one to tell.

"Make up your fucking mind, Hoberman." Her voice cracks like a whip. Her eye doesn't move an inch. "Is this boat dropping you somewhere safe and strategic, or am I shoving your ass out the nearest porthole?"

"Oh, the first one," he answers immediately. "I am a smart man."

"No," she sighs, wearily dropping her head back to the softness of the sofa. "But you're not quite as dumb as I thought."

 

 

Watching his father settle back in his chair, smiling softly at the news of his namesake, the weight of the quest has never felt heavier.

Quentin has looked into this warm, loving face his whole life — one made up of features so like his own, features he'd passed on to _his_ son — and he hadn’t realized until right this moment just how much that face had filled with pain in the fleeting visits between finding magic and losing it.

Those familiar eyes are clear now, all the little lines less pronounced. The sight isn't enough to make him take the words back, the words he'd warred with himself to find and speak and believe, but it's enough to make them hurt as much as they should.

He makes himself smile back. It only falters for a second. "He was born like, uh, a century ago? So. I guess technically it was his name first."

_Delicate touches to delicate skin, tiny limbs dotted with fragrant drops of peach oil. And a look, passed between them, knowing and expectant and openly amused. Certain. He'd objected, at first — it's archaic, even for Fillory — but standing on ceremony means the chance to do this, for him. For all of them._

_"Theodore Rupert Coldwater-Waugh."_

_Her eyebrows arch high, but her soft laugh follows, distracts him from the dark head that had snapped up sharply at the sound of his voice. "Well, it's a mouthful."_

_Warm oil presses from her fingers to both his temples, to each of his pulse points, pulls at the bow of his lip where it mimics the curve of her grin. Above her head, guarded eyes are fixed on his face, full of questions this has already answered._

_"Q —"_

_"Theodore Rupert Coldwater-Waugh." A shrug and a smile that both feel like a plea, in spite of all he's offering. "First of his name. Taker of naps, destroyer of diapers. King of the wooden crib."_

_Ari turns with the bowl. Eliot's eyes fill with tears._

_Throat working, he lets her strip his shirt away. Lets her gentle hands anoint his head, his mouth, the palms of his hands and the skin over his heart, bind him to their son in thought and deed and breath and love. Even with his stilted nod and his jaw set, with the shiver that runs through him and the shrug he throws back like a lifeline, those eyes spark and shine and never waver for a second._

_"So say we all."_

_A snort of surprise, thick with everything they've left unsaid. "Really? We're crossing those streams now?"_

_Between them, her head shakes, hands setting the bowl aside to swaddle their sleeping son tight._

_"Oh, my men." Lips find a bare shoulder, linger when long fingers come up to catch her there. She laughs again, fond, full of feeling, and leaves the bundle of baby in El's arms like an anchor, holding him in the place where he belongs. "My silly, stupid men."_

Quentin pulls in a ragged breath, bracing. If he hadn't been willing to see this part through — to share the best thing he's ever done, on the brink of the worst thing he can think of — he would never have brought it up in the first place. But for all that he's thought and relived and reminisced, actually _talking_ about Teddy is unfamiliar territory.

In this lifetime, he's only ever said his name once.

One of his dad's big, broad hands moves from the arm of his chair to rest low on his stomach. "And what about your wife?"

Relief rushes over him like a wave. He's lived so much longer without her, had so much more time to mourn, to miss her, to make the thought of her nothing but warm and welcome… this is. Easier.

"Arielle," he says. "Her name was Arielle."

"It's a beautiful name."

"Well, it went along with the rest of her." For a split second, her wide-open face is all he can see. "Ari was… she was sweet, and clever, and generous. _Really_ funny. But in, um, in kind of a twisted way?" He scrubs his chin with the pads of his fingers, mouth tugging into the same smile she'd always pulled from him. "God, she would make the best faces. Couldn't hide anything she was feeling. And she _knew that_ , and used it to beat me at cards."

Dad chuckles out a breath that seems to move his whole body. "Sounds like you really liked her."

"I mean…" Quentin says, brows pulled together, " _yeah_. I loved her, I… she was my wife."

"No, I know. But you can love someone, with all your heart, and not like who they are. That part's always harder. That's your _head_. And it's tough to get past."

He's sure the irony of that statement isn't lost on either of them, but there's no joke or judgement behind it. "I liked her a lot. She was impossible not to like."

"Good," Dad says. "That's good. I'm glad I get to know how you spent your life. Who you spent it with."

It's so simultaneously true and not that it almost makes Quentin cringe. He hates to take this, too, this small happiness, when he's already set to take so much. But leaving it there feels like a betrayal — to that life, to Arielle. To Eliot.

"I didn't, um…" He starts, stops, presses his palms together between his knees. "She died. Ari. About six years in."

"Ah, Curly Q, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear that." His father's face twists, all the pain coming back again, and for a moment, Quentin feels a flash of gratitude for the _way_ they'd lost her. For all it had gutted him at the time, he hadn't had to watch her waste away. Hadn't had to sit idly by while she left them, slowly but surely, little by little — she was fine, and then she was gone, and he'd only had to be helpless for a moment.

Dad palms his knees, fingers digging little divots in the fabric. "I know divorce isn't really... Well. I didn't lose your mom the way you lost your wife. I certainly didn't have to grieve that way, not when she'd been gone long before she left. But I know what it's like to be left alone with a little boy you have to make into a man."

"Mine didn't come with the kind of complications I did, so." Quentin spreads his hands, shapes his mouth into the shadow of a smile. "Guess I got off easy there."

His dad's eyes, already so familiar, fill with sad, single-minded affection. "This is never easy, son. I wouldn't trade it, not for the world. It's just not what I wanted for you."

The bitter, broken part of Quentin that's still mourning so much wants to tell him that it's a moot point now. That it's all in the past, or the future, or somewhere in between, that it's already happened and also never will.

"I actually wasn't," he says instead. "Left alone."

Not until the end.

Sharing the story of what he'd had with Ari had been simple. Cathartic, even. But explaining the what and when and why of Eliot, things he hasn't even been able to answer for himself... Just the thought of it makes him anxious, rubs at a wound that's still red and raw and bleeding.

"I started this, the quest, with a whole group of friends. Magicians. People I care about. But for this part of it, for, for _fifty years_ of it… there was just Eliot. Me and Eliot."

He hangs there, trying to find any words in the world worthy of describing who Eliot is, _was_ , as a father and a partner and a person. To find the right way to say that he'd stepped through a clock with nothing but his best friend and a magic book and the clothes on his back, and filled the next fifty years with everything he ever needed. But he watches his father's head tilt, watches his expression smooth into pride and relief and understanding, and knows he doesn't really have to.

"That's how I spent my life," he echoes. "Who I spent it with."

Dad leans forward over his lap. The smile that settles over his face feels like every fuzzy blanket and bedtime story of his childhood, like the oldest safety he's ever known.

"So, when you said you lived a whole life," he says, "you meant you lived a good one."

It's not a question, but Quentin nods anyway. "Better than good," he answers, breath catching in his chest. " _Beautiful_."

"And now you're off to bring magic back together. You and Eliot." The smile dims its wattage, wistful at the edges. "I wish I'd been able to meet him."

There's a flood of words dammed at the tip of his tongue — _we aren't_ and _it's complicated_ and _technically together, just not that way_ — and none of them matter, not really. Not when Eliot still means so much, when he's still so lucky to have him at all.

"You will," he says, swallowing everything else. "If… I hope you will."

Dad nods, almost to himself, and settles back again. "Curly Q, I know you didn't come here looking for my permission, but… you were a father. You know what it's like to do anything, _give_ anything. So don't be sorry, son. You're right, we don't know what's gonna happen. But it seems like you got a happy ending, in that whole, beautiful life you lived. And if doing this means you get one in the life you're living now, then I'll gladly give you mine."

 

 

Quentin has spent months missing magic like a lost limb, but never more than he does during the three and a half hours it takes to get from Jersey back to Brakebills without the aid of a portal.

Dad had asked if he wanted to stay the night — they were both weary by the end, talked out and wrung dry — but after the weight of their conversation, of his confessions and his father's concessions, all the walls were closing in, and the thought of laying down and waking up in his old bed, as if the world was still simple, had sent him running for the ferry.

He drags himself through the door of the cottage, closes it behind him as quietly as he can manage. The golden glow of marquee letters is the only light to one side, and the dead spot at their center is almost taunting. _You seriously think you can bring back magic?_ _You can't even plug the fucking D back in._

"Hey."

His head whips to his left, toward a quiet voice he knows well. He blinks into a black sea of fuzzy-familiar shapes, and Eliot's silhouette, more familiar than anything, waves from the window seat.

"Hey." Quentin shifts into the lounge, hovering by the back of the bar. "I thought you were still in Fillory."

Eliot clucks his tongue. "Not so much. I graciously conceded, clapped my way through the coronation, and toasted High King Bambi's triumphant return to the throne with some _shockingly_ bad champagne. She's got some loose ends to tie up before she can turn her royal attention to the quest, but I thought I would… scout ahead." It's exactly the kind of careful they aren't with each other anymore, haven't been in what feels like forever, and he course corrects almost as soon as the words are out. "I figured I'd be of more help here. Julia may have sent a bunny or six."

Quentin snorts, just to drown out the relief. "You mean she didn't just… beam herself to Whitespire to announce my existential angst?" he says wearily, flicking on the lamp by the bookcase. "I might be a little insulted."

Eliot is fully dressed, in Earth clothes — shirtsleeves and suspenders, vest and tie and perfectly pressed pants — as if his big plans for the night had actually entailed sitting alone in the dark 'til midnight.

"Oh, Q," he sighs. "When I say 'help,' I mean primarily in an alcoholic capacity."

One hand comes up, the stems of two glasses twined between his fingers, and the other reaches down to pluck a bottle of 2012 Barolo from the floor.

" _Wow_ , the big guns. Which you're about to waste on my emo crisis of conscience."

"No occasion more deserving. It's a very moody grape." He sets the glasses down on the windowsill, hands making quick work of the corkscrew, and pours a few ounces of brick red gold for them both. "Besides, after enduring what was frankly a Fillorian crime against fermentation, Daddy needs to swing hard in the other direction."

Quentin shuffles forward, flopping down to the seat beside him and reaching for the glass he's offering.

"Speaking of daddies," El says softly, "how is yours?"

The wine is a perfect excuse to pause, breathing be damned — it rolls over his tongue, rich and woody and aged to perfection, smelling of leather and roses, of ripe, juicy plums.

"My dad is fine," he finally answers, half hollow. He draws his heels up to the edge of the window seat and props his chin in the space between his knees. When he laughs, it's with a bitterness that certainly isn't the Barolo. "That's the whole problem, isn't it? He's perfectly fine right now, and I am… I'm on an epic quest to make him _not_."

"Okay," Eliot says, "before you descend into the depths of full-on Disney villain, let's just take a moment and talk this through. We know your dad got better when we got cut off."

"Right." Quentin takes another swig of too-good wine. "Because magic comes from pain, and apparently also causes cancer."

One foot slips from the edge and falls to the floor, and the horror of his next thought, the thought that has never crossed his mind 'til now, what with the quest and the Library and whatever the hell is going on with Alice, must be written all over his face — Eliot is reaching for him before he can even get the words out.

"Oh god, El, what if… what if, by bringing magic back, I'm giving, like, _millions_ of people _cancer_?"

"And we've skipped the Disney portion entirely," Eliot mumbles, his hand solid and warm on the curve of Quentin's back. His breath hitches as he hesitates, brows pulled together.

"Just to clarify… has that honestly never occurred to you before?"

" _Eliot._ "

"Sorry, I'm sorry." He knocks back half his glass in one big gulp, closes his eyes as he swallows. " _Fuck_ , okay. I know our various quest-related shenanigans have dragged up a lot of deeply personal baggage. But plucking a single person from the jaws of terminal illness just to fuck with your head is a stretch, even for this. And I'm sure we can all agree that I sufficiently ticked the daddy issues box when I fed my father to cannibals." His glass comes up, almost unconsciously, like a little toast to the memory. "So… do I think it's possible that a not insignificant amount of bad shit disappeared when magic did? Yes."

Quentin groans, pressing the pads of his fingers into his eyes until he sees stars. "Oh my god."

"But, _but_ , I also think it's possible that a not insignificant amount of bad shit that magic made _infinitely_ better is bad again now that it's gone. Think of the hospitals and shelters and nonprofits that relied on help from magic to help other people, or all the battered women and bullied queer kids whose wards just went away."

He thinks of what he'd said to his father — _no matter what choice I make, somebody gets hurt_. As it turns out, _somebody_ is plural.

"Hey," Eliot says, lets it hang there until Quentin looks back. "This is all _beyond_ fucked, and for us, that's saying something. We are on Schrodinger's quest here, Q. But it's the one we've been given. And we're not here to decide who gets to suffer. We're here to fix what we broke."

_The green pulls back together next, fusing from each edge toward the center until all its pieces are one._

_Two sets of eyes watch him work from the table, one small and sullen. "I didn't mean to break them." He nearly laughs at the look that it gets, has to press his lips together and trap it inside. "I mean, I_ did, _but I thought I'd be able to fix them! You know, if I had to. Dad does it so easily, and you're always saying that I'm so much like him —"_

_"When you're being earnest and manipulative and adorable, the way you are right now." A big hand reaches out to a face so like his own, gives its frown a playful push. "Otherwise, kiddo, you are every inch your mother's son."_

_The scowl is painted in shades of sullen teen, two years and change too early. "My mother never had magic."_

_"Your mother made her own. She couldn't cast, and she couldn't have fixed this. But she was one of the most magical people in the world." An arm snakes around Teddy's shoulders, tugs him into a space he's almost outgrown. "Everybody breaks sometimes, Teddy Bear. You just have to find the things that help put you back together."_

_It takes everything he has to look away again, to focus on the final tile and its trio of blue pieces — one long rectangle, one wide, jagged trapezoid, the tiny triangle that fits just between. He barely has to tut, barely nudge them with his magic, before they've mended into one solid square._

_Then it sits in his palm as the sum of its parts, whole and unbroken, like it's never been anything else._

Eliot's eyes are fixed on his, full of sympathy and kindness and understanding. It's a look he knows well, one he hadn't found in Fillory, in another life, but long before. He practically pours the rest of his wine down his throat.

"Sure," he says, eyes stinging, throat burning, "let's go with that."

The hand on his back slides up his spine to slip around the back of his neck, tugs. "C'mere."

"You don't have to," Quentin mumbles, sighing into the steady sweep of a thumb behind one ear and swaying toward him, anyway. "Pretty sure I smell like a bus station."

Eliot's mouth twitches around the smile he's trying to fight. "I'll take my chances," he says. "Come _here_."

The thing is, Quentin's almost positive that _here_ is Eliot's shoulder, the little hollow of space where he's fit for almost as long as they've been friends. But he's been alone with his thoughts for the last three hours, bleary and bone tired, and sitting here in the shadows, easy contact and difficult conversation blurring the lines between what once was and what is now, he wants nothing more than to curl up in a ball in Eliot's lap, the way he'd done so often when they'd been more.

So he takes a deep breath, and lets himself fall.

He tips to one side, head landing in the little triangle between the long leg that hangs over the edge and the one Eliot has tucked under him. A jolt of tension tightens the thigh pressed to his shoulder, but by the time he settles it's gone, nearly forgotten at the feel of fingers in his hair.

"That's what I went there to tell him in the first place. What I said, more or less."

Eliot hums, scratching lightly along his scalp. "How'd that work out for you?"

"He said it's cool if I kill him, as long as magic makes me happy?" It's strangled and rushed and a little too loud, and he makes himself pause to pull more air into his lungs. "That was basically it. In a nutshell."

"That is… a lot to pack in one nut."

"It was like seppuku," Quentin says flatly. "But the fucked-up cartoon one with Mr. Rogers. Seriously, El, I just… watched my father fall on the metaphorical sword in khakis and a sensible sweater." The laughter is silent, but he can feel it stutter through Eliot's limbs. "This is so stupid. I told him what I had to do, and what it could cost, and he gave me his goddamn _permission_. So why the hell am I… _this_?"

There's a beat and a big breath and then nothing, for a long moment, silence and stillness the calling cards of Eliot giving something serious thought.

That Eliot takes him seriously at all remains both mystery and miracle.

"Remember the day of your entrance exam?" It's deliberately light and surprisingly quiet, but barely a question at all. As if he could forget. As if he would. "You took a batshit test full of transfiguration. You walked through a portal to another place. As each of those things happened to you, you knew they were magical. But you didn't actually _believe_ that magic was real until Fogg pushed you to do it. Until you made it happen yourself."

Quentin thinks back to his first day here at Brakebills, to his curiosity and confusion and wonder — at the grounds, at the test — that had all paled in comparison to the sheer _purpose_ in building a castle of cards with nothing but his hope and his rage and his will.

The moment Eliot made happen for himself, long before Brakebills, had been anything but magical. That the words are so sure, and so right, just goes to show how well El's always known him.

Gentle knuckles graze the hair at his temple, once, twice, again. "I bet you rehearsed it in your head a hundred times today," Eliot says, "but you never imagined he'd tell you that it was okay. Maybe… it didn't feel real 'til then."

The truth of it washes over him, erases the soft wine warmth with something sharp and cold and sober. He'd asked Julia just this morning if that's what the quest wanted him to be, cold, if he had to sacrifice the people he loved. It never occurred to him that they might volunteer to sacrifice themselves.

He isn't worth it.

Magic is, maybe. Cancer notwithstanding, the world with magic must be better off than it is without, or taking it away wouldn't be a punishment. But Dad's blessing had been about something else entirely. He'd slapped a hand on Quentin's shoulder, squeezed, and said _you do whatever you need to_ in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with _him_. His well-being, his happiness.

Quentin's been chasing happiness for as long as he can remember. But if this is the cost of his happiness — this trade-off, this calculated loss — he's not sure that he wants it, anyway.

It's tempting to tell Eliot just that, all of it. To peel back his skin and pry open his skull and lay the scrambled contents of his brain at El's feet, the way he'd done so often in their past future that it became a habit.

Laid out like this, it's tempting to do a lot of things.

The phantom touch of his father's hand on his shoulder fades away, brushed clear by the feel of fingers raking through his hair. This is still bigger than him.

"Maybe," he says instead. "You know, that was… strangely insightful."

Eliot laughs, low and musical. "What can I say? _In vino veritas_."

"Right." There's other Latin in his lungs, trapped and waiting to breathe. _Vincit omnia veritas_ , it whispers. _Audentis Fortuna iuvat_. "I'm not sure whether to keep you _away_ from four-hundred-dollar bottles of wine or break out the Barolo more often."

"Five," Eliot amends, winding the ends of his hair around one finger. "And that's the last of it."

"Well that makes me feel a _whole lot_ better," Quentin mutters. He pivots his hips and pushes off the foot on the floor, until he's flat on his back and looking up, until he can see Eliot's face. The hand in his hair slips from his head to rest low on his throat, palm pressed to the hollow beneath his pulse like a bible.

He blows out a breath, and the closest truth in his chest escapes. "I told my dad. About the Mosaic."

Eliot raises both eyebrows. His mouth parts, just a bit, as he inhales. "Oh?"

"Just in general, at first," Quentin says. "Then he wanted to know about Ari. About… about Teddy. Kinda seemed like the least I could do, considering."

"No, I get it. You don't have to explain yourself to me, Q." Eliot's thumb traces absently at the skin along his collar. "So what did you…"

"Just little things. Teddy's name. Arielle's ridiculous reverse psychology poker face. That we lost her." He sniffs. The little things seem to loom so large, now. "He, um. He wants to meet you."

Hovering above him, head tipped down, El's eyes are nothing but shadows. "Wait, so you… you _told him_ , told him." Quentin shrugs, half in the affirmative and half out of avoidance — he hadn't exactly said the words, but his dad knows, nonetheless. Eliot blinks, expression going carefully blank. Still, something in his face feels fragile. "I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to that. I mean… do you _want me_ to meet your dad, Quentin?"

"I —" Quentin swallows, feels it shift the weight of Eliot's fingers. Hopes like hell they hadn't registered the way his heart had stopped cold for a beat at the end of _do you want me_. "I want my dad to meet you."

"That's semantics."

He shakes his head, hair dragging back and forth over Eliot's thigh. "No it's not."

_"End of the row is two yellows, then a blue. And after that, you can tell your wife how right I am on this."_

_His hands shift the tiles into place. The smile blooms before he can stop it. "Yeah, no, I plead the fifth."_

_"I'm just saying, it's not as if there isn't a precedent."_

_The sound she makes is half laugh and half moan, head lolling forward. He stops to watch them for a moment, take in the picture they paint — the two of them twined together in the grass, a baby-heavy body bracketed by long legs, swaying rhythmically as knuckles knead her lower back._

_"In one of your musical stories." The words don't match the tone, sarcasm blanketed in bliss. "Why yes, that eases all my concerns."_

_"We thought Fillory was fictional, once upon a time. So excuse me if I find comfort in the story of the love child of two worlds who went on to become the most powerful magician in Oz." Lips pause to press solidly to the crown of her head, while her mouth curls at the corners, one hand rubbing affectionately at his calf. "Of course, it also made her_ green _, but, you know, weigh it."_

He blinks away the memory, and it becomes something different, something older and newer all at once. _I stuck it out with men long enough for you to exist,_ his mother's voice spits in his head, not even a week out of his first hospital. _You could try to be a little more grateful_.

All at once, the thing he's grateful for is _Eliot,_ who'd kept Ari so alive for their son. During the worst of the grieving Quentin thought more than once that she'd only lived long enough that Teddy could, when they'd been lucky to have her, to love her, and even luckier that she'd left a living, breathing piece of herself behind.

"Do you, um…" He starts, stops, tries again. "I keep. Having these memories of my life there. Then. Of our life."

Eliot's fingers twitch on his chest. "Yes, Quentin, it all came back to me," he says. "I think we've established that we're living the same Celine Dion song."

"That's not what I —" Quentin tips back, trying to catch his eyes. "These memories, it's like… it's not bits and pieces anymore, El. I mean they _are_ , they're these random snippets of time, but. They're crystal clear. I couldn't tell you the names of half my high school teachers, but I could tell you exactly what you made for breakfast the morning of my sixty-ninth birthday."

Eliot tilts his head. "To be fair, that is a very good number for me." He polishes off the rest of his wine, mouth twisting as he swallows. "We were different people, Q. Then, there, whatever adverb we're going with."

 _That's not me_ , his head taunts, _and that's definitely not you._ The little laugh that bursts from his mouth surprises even him, buoys him enough to say what he hadn't said then. "Well _that's_ bullshit."

"Is it?"

" _Eliot._ " His hand comes up to cover the one on his collar bone, and for now, he lets his own question go unanswered. "If you honestly think the you who waited up in the middle of the night just to make sure I wasn't a total fucking mess isn't the _same_ you who… who braided Ari's hair in the morning or taught Teddy how to spell his name in tiles, then you've never been more wrong about anything in your life."

He watches Eliot's jaw work, watches him suck his lower lip into his mouth.

Then the hand under his flattens, spreads, squeezes when their fingers fall together.

"Come now, Q," El says, thick in all the places it's meant to be light. "You spent the last several hours spilling your soul to your almost-ailing father, then took public transportation back from _New Jersey_. The hot mess was a foregone conclusion."

 

 

The den is a dark little space at the back, off the kitchen, that everyone seems to forget actually exists.

Which is why it's probably the safest place to do this. The place he's least likely to be found.

Julia's magic is an anxious twinkle in his veins, tingling, trying to escape. He drops down to the sofa, kicking up a little cloud of dust, and puts his arms on his knees and his head in his hands, attempting to calm down and clear his mind and conjure an image of Castle Blackspire.

And that's right about when Eliot comes in.

He slips through the door and closes it behind him, tucking his hands in his pockets and raising an eyebrow expectantly.

"Quentin," he says, deadpan, "fancy meeting you here."

 _Oh,_ he almost answers, _right_.

Because _everyone_ does not include Eliot, who absolutely knows this room exists. Eliot, who actually knows this room kind of intimately.

The first time Quentin found it, during his fourth Physical Kids Cottage party, he'd come back from the library to a sock on his door — because these are the things that happen to Quentin Coldwater — stumbled across a random room on his way to the backyard with a book, and walked in on Eliot getting blown by some second year Naturalist.

It had not been his finest moment. Eliot, on the other hand, had been decidedly unfazed.

"Uh, hey," he stammers, aiming for neutral and missing by a mile. "Wha— what are you doing?"

"What are _you_ doing?"

Quentin shrugs and shoves at his hair, every movement stuttered and stunted. It's like all his limbs have forgotten how they work. "I'm… not sure what you mean."

"Yeah, pretty and dumb only does it for me in _very_ specific situations. And occasionally when I'm just too drunk to care." Eliot crosses his arms over his chest. "I know you, Q. Someone asks an ominous question, you stalk off all silent and solo, it's only a matter of time before you throw yourself onto the altar of something incredibly brave and equally ill-advised. Even without magic. Maybe _especially_ without magic."

It's _really tempting_ to lie. To play his cards close to the vest, until he knows for sure if this is something that he can even pull off.

The problem, of course, is the look on Eliot's face. He's serious. He's genuinely concerned. He hasn't even brought his goddamn drink.

While Ari had been busy shamelessly hustling him at poker, Eliot had never played. He'd _watched_ , with a wineskin or a tile design or the baby, quietly learning all of Quentin's tells.

Besides, only one of them wears the vests in this relationship.

"I _have_ magic," he says softly. "Julia left me a little goodbye gift."

Eliot's mouth drops open and his arms drop to his sides. "Quentin, what the _fuck._ "

"I don't mean, not _magic_ magic, not in the way you're thinking. The power she gave me, it's… just enough. For a one-off spell." Quentin swipes his hand down his face, trying to find some way to salvage this. "I figured, if I could find a way to talk to the knight, we could make sure that she'll let us in."

"Oh my god," Eliot groans, hands steepled over his mouth. "You know, for a group of people charged with saving all the magic in the known universe, we are _spectacularly bad_ at communicating."

"El —"

"So you're telling me Julia left you enough newly-minted goddess juice for exactly one magical quickie, and you'd rather… jerk off with it than share with the class and commit to an all-out orgy." His eyes slip closed, and his head shakes a bit. "That metaphor skewed more sexual than I intended."

"Yeah," Quentin says flatly, "must be something about the room."

Eliot's eyes come up to pin him with a glare, loaded and lingering. "What if trying to contact the knight _doesn't work_ , Q? What if we'd whiteboarded it out, _knowing_ you have this kernel of magic, and someone managed to come up with a better idea? Trust me, Margo's done more with a hell of a lot less."

Quentin holds up a hand. "I just thought —"

"You just thought you'd decide for everyone," Eliot says stiffly, "which, historically, has not worked out all that well for me."

All the air leaves his lungs in a rush — after last night's conversation, after the last fifty years, the last thing Quentin wants is to conjure the memory of the fucked-up fairy deal that had been such a well-meant betrayal, that had cost Margo an eye but cost Eliot his throne and his daughter and almost his best friend.

"El," he says, standing. Reaching. "Hey, _no_ —"

"Look, I know Julia is your Bambi and she gave you the magic. But we're all on this quest, Quentin, it is a group fucking project. Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you that you are not _alone,_ here?"

The callback is a double-edged sword, affirmation and admonition all at once — the latter stings, but it's the former that sticks.

The first time he'd ever heard it, they'd barely known each other. But even before crowning kings and Cancer Puppy, before bank heist heroics and bunny messages that end in _love, Eliot_ , before days turned decades of being alone _with him_ became as natural as breathing, he'd looked into that wide-open face, words deep and dark and secret still echoing in his ears, and known it was unequivocally true.

 _With a friend_ , his past-self says pointedly. _We solved it together_.

He crosses what little distance there is, slides his hands down Eliot's arms. "That was it, okay? Last one. I'm sorry."

Eliot nods, once, with none of his usual grace. But his hands slip into the bends of Quentin's elbows, hold tight. "You could've at least had the decency to make your last martyr stand _after_ I'd finished mixing my drink."

"Well, we can't have everything." Quentin gives in to the urge to shove his hair behind his ears, then regrets it when Eliot takes a step back. "I really am sorry. I'm just… I'm trying to find some kind of foothold here, like, one hint of how this is all gonna go. I'd take a fucking probability spell at this point. Even with the projectile vomiting."

"Which still wouldn't get us into the castle," Eliot says, and sighs. "Was the key with the cryptic 'I saw you opening a door' vision really no help at all? Just curious, as someone looking to open a door."

Quentin shakes his head. "The vision key didn't work for me."

"But it worked for… _Beast_ you without breaking a sweat."

"Yeah, _I know_ , Eliot," he mutters, scowling before he can stop himself. "I'm telling you, I tried it, and it did absolutely nothing. Maybe being a six-fingered psychopath with moths for a face is just a prerequisite of use."

"Or…" Eliot pauses, brows pulled together, one finger pressed to his mouth. " _When_ did you try it?"

Quentin blinks. "Uh, when, as soon as they brought it back and Jules told me about... _other_ me. Why does _when_ even matter? I don't really have a timestamp, El, 'we let out a monster that's worse than The Beast' sounded kind of pressing."

"I'm not saying you did anything _wrong_ ," Eliot says, rolling his eyes in a way that's only half-serious. "I'm just saying… you may have done this particular thing wrong."

"You know what, I'm gonna hurt you in a minute."

His grin means this teasing is totally worth it, if only to erase the last of the tension in his eyes. "So Josh and Julia went timeline jumping and came back with the seventh key."

"Yes. Which you knew already."

"Indeed. But that was before we got the _sixth_ one from the fairies."

Every impatient, slightly irritated word on the tip of Quentin's tongue flies away, and instead he's left with a reddening face and a ringing in his ears and the distinct feeling that he's a fucking idiot.

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh, shit."

Eliot shrugs, as if he hasn't maybe managed to solve this whole thing. "I mean, I could be wrong. But it did turn the kumbaya key back on for a hot minute. Not to mention the fact that we have a book with a quest that only reveals its secrets sequentially. Maybe for us, the order actually matters."

_"I think I've already been through this set." Smudged fingers shuffle sheaves of paper like cards, stacks of pages with little hash marks of color, until all their squares blur together. "There's got to be a better way, Eliot, this is… we can't keep doing it like this."_

_A warm hand lands at the top of his spine, kneading. "Take a break. I may have an idea."_

_It takes longer than a break — two days, then three, until it's nearly forgotten. He's back to his daily shuffling when the same hand slaps a bundle of something down in front of him, triumphant._

_"So the bad news is, I've pretty much polished off the wine."_

_"That is news to exactly no one."_

_"Brat. The_ good _news is, I may or may not have hacked the Mosaic with magic." The declaration makes no sense whatsoever, but the spark in those eyes is welcome distraction. "Well, not the Mosaic, per se, but… ever use one of those Bluetooth pens that records everything you write?"_

_The bundle unrolls; a carved quill, a bottomless well, a swathe of oil cloth with a deep black grid._

_The spell is shockingly simple. But the_ magic _is incredibly complex, more than anyone's ever given this man credit for, with all their failures locked beneath its surface._

_He runs through the tut twice, watching yesterday's patterns emerge and fade away again._

_"I could seriously kiss you right now."_

_The smile that answers — small and soft at first, then wide and bright and open — has long since become his favorite._

_"Nobody's stopping you."_

"Um," he says, swallows before he can continue. "The keys are, they're in my bag. In the drawer up front."

Eliot turns, reaching for the doorknob, and Quentin jerks forward to grab at his arm.

"Wait, it's, I don't think… _fuck_ , um, the thing is, I know we _literally_ just talked about not doing this alone, but is there any way that we could do this alone?" Eliot raises an eyebrow, and Quentin steps back, thumbs tucked in his sleeves, arms wrapped around his middle.

"I'm the only one who's actually going to _see_ it, right? And if it's as fucked up as Julia thinks it is, if it was enough to make some sick version of me _more_ like Martin fucking Chatwin, I don't think I can do that with an audience. I swear that I'll… El, if this works, I will transcribe it word for word and present it to the rest of the group on a silver platter. With slides, if I have to. Can we just, can we try the… actual _key part_ in here?"

Somewhere in his frantic rambling Eliot had fully turned back to him, had laid both hands on either side of his neck.

"Q, _hey_ , of course we can." He swipes his thumbs over the skin along Quentin's jaw, eyes soft and gentle and sympathetic. "I'm trying to get you to give up some of the burden, not trying to give you a coronary. Okay?"

Quentin nods, as much as he can held in Eliot's hands. "Okay."

He watches Eliot slip out of the room and tries not to count the seconds. Then he's back, bag in hand, closing the door again behind him.

"We definitely dodged a bullet," he mumbles, undoing the buckles and folding down the flap. "From what little I heard, Hoberman's bright idea is to buy our way into Blackspire with a _muffin basket_."

Quentin tries not to cringe as he reaches inside — they'd shoved the suicide key in the truth key's little case, specifically to prevent any accidental contact, but just the thought of it in Eliot's hands, in his _head_ , is enough to give him hives.

"Bingo." El pointedly pulls the key out by the teeth, it's label dangling in the air, and makes a little sound of unsurprised disappointment. "Well, it was worth a shot. Looks like this one only talks to Quentins."

It slips through his fingers until he has it by the tag and he's holding it out like an offering. Quentin watches it spin, slowly, back and forth, and for a moment he's struck by its handle, how different it is from all the others — geometric where they're fluid, angled where they have curves, with two lines like lightning at its center, coming together to strike the same point.

He pulls in a breath and blows it back out again. "Here goes… everything."

His hand reaches out, fingers closing around the key.

And, just as before, nothing happens whatsoever.

Eliot is watching him curiously, head tilted, hand to his mouth. "Is this your vision face?" he stage whispers, as if he's watching some abstract performance art. "Because I kind of expected something more in the 'sudden enlightenment' range."

"It's not _working_ , there's… it still won't work for me." Quentin presses his lips into a flat line, trying to beat back the sting of angry tears. " _Goddamn it_. What are we supposed to do now, Eliot?"

" _Now_ , we rally the troops and figure shit out," Eliot answers. "It was a hunch, it didn't pan out, that's our cue to move the fuck on. Knowing us, we're missing something vital and obvious and incredibly simple that one of the girls will spot in two seconds flat." He takes a step forward, into Quentin's space, flashes a smile that's steady and sure. "This isn't over. You still have magic, Q. The architect said that we'd find a way in, right?"

Quentin swallows, nodding. "Right."

"So, we find a way in. No slideshow necessary." Eliot rolls his eyes, exaggerated and over-dramatic, as he reaches to reclaim the key. "And if all else fails, I suppose there's always the muffins."

Laughter bubbles from his mouth, surprising and welcome, making him bright and buoyant and _better_ all at once, making him believe something besides the voice in his head in a way only Eliot has ever really managed.

Then long fingers curl around the length of the key, brushing his, skin on his skin, and

a voice cries out, _his_ voice, in warning, in terror, bouncing from stone walls before it's smothered by the sound of a shot, and he turns in the darkness to the body on the ground, magic floating from a fatal wound, shining and shimmering and

golden, getting brighter, until there's a glowing halo of light made of magic, floating above his head, the metal melting away while he's frozen here

helpless, eyes he doesn't know and has known forever flashing fire above a smile he's never seen, childlike and wondrous, monstrous, greedy hands reaching out for him, grabbing on and

leaning forward, shaking, tongue as cold and numb as the rest of him, flooded with the taste of sickly-sweet vanilla, topped with the spatter of sprinkles and

blood, thick and red and sticky-warm, filling his nostrils with copper, flowing freely down an arm that still aches with a phantom wound, over fingers that shake as they peel the animal apart, shuddering as its spine

snaps, broken wing in one hand and body of the plane in the other, and he hurls them both to the back wall, watches them burst into a shower of smaller

pieces of him feel put back together, as if he's mended himself with magic, as if four words that mean nothing to anyone but the two of them have breathed him back to life, and even with the wet throb down his back and the bodies at his feet, it still feels like he's

flying, falling, crashing to the wall and the floor in a heap that rattles his bones, makes everything ache, even before the shadow comes, in a shape he knows, with fuzzy-familiar hands that close around his throat in a way they've never touched him, a way that feels foreign and careless and _wrong_ , thumbs crushing his windpipe around his desperate, detached, dead-sounding

words, carefully pitched to mimic comfort and calm, with one hand on his shoulder and the other curled at his chest like a claw, an inhuman pantomime of everything that once made him feel safe, and he has no defense but to hold his breath, hold up his hands, hope it won't crush him like a bug before he can even

blink, and it's there, in the room, ripping another stone from another body, turning to them with eyes like black holes, but he steps forward as they fall back, silently

pleading, in a voice he's never heard before, one that echoes through the trees and tears through his chest, leaves his hands shaking as he

tuts, as natural as breathing, _feels_ the rift begin to fix itself, every fracture and fissure finding its mate, and he revels in the rightness of it before the screaming makes him move, away from the shower of sparks at his back, where the cold and dark and grey is bursting into bright, white-hot color, and

then there is

nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once I outlined this fic to a ridiculous level of detail, I realized it couldn't possibly be done in four parts, so it'll unfold in six. I swear, finishing the next one won't take me a month.


	3. Give Me a Clue Whereabout I Should Start

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last time I was here I swore the next update wouldn't take me a month, and _technically_ I wasn't wrong! So sorry about the wait -- between work and three trips and the mechanics of time travel, this chapter was like pulling teeth. But I do hope that you enjoy. **TW** for Quentin revisiting some past suicidal ideation.

Awareness comes back in a rush, along with each of his senses. But it takes a little longer for his lungs to expand, for his brain to remember to tell his body how to breathe, and for an endless, unbearable moment, it feels like Quentin is dying.

Then the vice falls away, and he gulps air in so fast he chokes on it, coughing and clutching at his chest. His field of vision is a pinprick that slowly widens, dark and fuzzy at the edges, but once focus swims in all he can see is Eliot, stricken and pale and shaking, and suddenly needs to touch him more than he's ever needed anything.

" _El,_ " he gasps, reaching.

Eliot recoils, reeling back and wrenching open the door to stumble out of the room, where he doubles over, drops to his knees, and retches violently into the trash.

Quentin trails after him, moving into the kitchen on autopilot and legs that feel like lead. He hits the island with one hip, and the impact throbs through the bone as he turns to let himself slide gracelessly down the cabinets to the floor.

The inside of his head is a jumbled mess of moving pictures, splintered and shattered and stabbing behind his eyes, like shards of glass too sharp to hold. He can't make sense of any of it — all the places and faces and voices stack and lock and fuse, one on top of another, sharing the same space, until nothing is distinguishable at all. But he can _feel_ it, like an open wound. The hopelessness and desperation, the all-consuming fear.

And the sudden point when it all, abruptly, stops.

He's been here before, drowning in the sea of these emotions. But the yawning hollow of having them severed, in one fell swoop, that is… something altogether new. Something he'd wanted and plotted and planned, once upon a time.  Before Brakebills, before magic. Before he'd known he could live a whole, full life, even feeling it all, with three generations' worth of proof that the world was better with him in it. _Before_.

With the reality of it still beating at his brain, both foreshadowing and aftermath, he's a breath away from being every bit as sick as Eliot.

He reaches out again, laying a hand between El's shoulder blades, and tries to ignore the little pang in his chest when he flinches. Eliot is safe and solid and _here_ , and for some reason he can't comprehend, that alone eases the ache he can still feel everywhere.

"What," Eliot croaks, still clutching the sides of the trash can, "the once and future _fuck_."

Quentin blinks, and there's a bright flash of overlaid images across the backs of his eyelids, like old negatives that have melted together.

"I don't know," he answers. "I have no goddamn idea. But it… El, I think it's bad."

"Well it sure as hell isn't _good_ , Quentin." Eliot rocks back into the space beside him, face pulled into a scowl, feet planted wide and flat on the floor and wrists hanging over his knees. "When you said _vision_ , I thought —" He swallows, the bite and bitterness of his sarcasm gone. "I thought it'd be more like… what the memories became. But that wasn't a vision, that was Terrence Malick's cutting room floor."

It's last night's loaded question, finally answered, but Quentin can barely feel the flutter of hope in his chest, not with the dread churning heavy in his head, throbbing like a fever.

"Did you get… _anything_ from it? Like, at all?"

"Besides the joy of revisiting my martini in reverse?" Eliot shakes his head. "Just the distinct impression that something wicked this way comes. Like, in the fuckton of awful sense. Of course, I haven't yakked up alcohol since I was like _twelve_ , so that could be the ghost of childhood trauma talking."

A tingle started at the back of Quentin's brain somewhere around _fuckton of awful_ , but it isn't until he unfurls the fist still clinging to the key that it clicks.

"How are you still _touching_ that thing?" Eliot exclaims. "For fuck's sake, Q, _drop it_."

It sounds, odds are not entirely coincidentally, like he's scolding a bad but beloved puppy, and under any other circumstances would have made him laugh as only Eliot can. As it stands, the echo in his head won't let him do anything but obey — he flings his hand up flat, and the key goes skittering to the tile.

 _Something happened beyond that point_ , his own voice comes back. _Something in the future_.

"Eliot," he says, voice hollow and far away. "What if this is it?"

Eliot blinks. "What if… what is what?"

" _It_ it." Quentin shudders, sucking in a breath. _Something wicked this way comes._ "The it that happens, in the future, that makes Jane start the loop."

When Eliot's mouth hitches up at one corner, it isn't a smile so much as his silent way of saying _you've got to be shitting me_. "The it she's trying to prevent, you mean."

"Yeah."

"The it we're supposedly here to _fix_."

Quentin shrugs, a little helplessly. "I mean… I guess? I don't even know what the hell I saw and I want to claw to my goddamn eyes out. Call me crazy, but. That feels time-loop-level bad to me."

"Let me get this straight," Eliot says, rubbing his temples, "because apparently, one epic treatise on time travel theory wasn't enough. You think that, from the beginning, this whole thing has been about… whatever's waiting on the other side of that vision."

"I don't _know_ , Eliot. I know it wasn't just about stopping _Martin Chatwin_." Quentin pulls his knees to his chest, curls forward to tuck his fingertips under his toes. "Maybe the timeline turning point isn't an actual _event_. Maybe… maybe what we're supposed to stop is another evil entirely."

 _Something much worse_ , Julia had said. _A monster_.

"And taking out The Beast was, what, a _trial run_?" Eliot groans, head and shoulders dropping back to the cabinet with a thunk. "This is why people hate horomancy."

Quentin snorts out a laugh, without fully intending to. "This exact thing in particular?"

"Hardly. But on the long list of reasons why horomancy is the worst, this whole clusterfuck has surely vaulted _directly_ to the top." His head rolls to his right, to Quentin. That feeling comes back in a rush — _Eliot is here_ , it throbs in his chest, _Eliot is right here_ — but the look on El's face, soft and wry and familiar, is almost enough to make him believe that it will all be fine. "To recap, we've got a quest for magic, a time loop for… reasons unknown, two heads full of vaguely vision-shaped puzzle pieces, and a matching case of the heebie-jeebies. As my decoder ring is sadly broken, any clue what we're supposed to do with all that?"

"Not really?" Propping his chin on his shoulder, Quentin smiles a bit, despite himself. "But we've beaten bigger puzzles before."

Eliot's eyes find his, full-on, the moss and amber of Fillory forests, and for the first time, for _once_ , he doesn't fall back or fade away at the mere mention of the Mosaic.

From the floor between them, there's a glint of gold on the tile.

And just like that, the pieces fall into place.

"Fuck," he breathes. "I can't believe I didn't… Oh my god, a _decoder ring_."

"That was rhetorical, Quentin. Feel free to stop freaking me out, oh, anytime now."

"It's not _all that_. It's _one_." Quentin swipes a hand down his face and tries to ignore the way it shakes. "The quest, the loop, the _vision_ , they… they're all the same, single thing."

"That's… a leap." Eliot pauses, one eyebrow up. "Isn't it?"

"No, you're right," Quentin says flatly. "We're just a group of random people who happened to be chosen for completely unrelated quests to stop a homicidal maniac, rule a kingdom on another planet, _save_ that planet from destruction by its own deity, and restore magic to the entire universe."

"I'm not saying it's _coincidence_ , Q. I'm saying it's cause and effect."

"And I'm saying it's _bigger_ than that. Has always been bigger. We keep getting stuck on all the ways we manage to fix things by fucking up something else, but… I think we were _supposed to_. I think she made sure of it. That we'd be here, _right here_ , fighting to finish the quest."

Eliot's mouth opens, closes, open again. " _How?_ "

It isn't clear if the question is _how do you know_ or _how did she do it_ or _how is that even possible_ , but it doesn't really matter — the answer to all of them is the same.

 _Do you remember¸_ Fogg's voice reverberates in his brain, thick with truth serum, _the gift that Jane was given in the book The Girl Who Told Time?_

"Pretty sure the proof has been staring me in the fucking face." Quentin nods to the tile between them. Not a ring. A _locket_. "I was always focused on the watch. But for as long as I've seen or known or had… creepy lucid dreams about Jane, _before_ The Beast, before the Watcherwoman, Jesus, even before _the_ _Mosaic_ … El, she has always, _always_. Worn a key."

Eliot stares for a moment, tongue trapped between his teeth. Then he blows out a breath that isn't quite a laugh, harsh and devoid of humor.

"Right."

Quentin plucks at a stray thread at the hem of his pants, watches the entire line of stitches unravel.

"You still think I'm reaching."

Eliot shakes his head. "What I think," he says, "is that I am in desperate need of a toothbrush, or at least a shot of something almost entirely ethanol." With a heavy sigh, he leans between his raised legs to pluck the key from the floor by its tag. "And then… I think it's about time we had a little talk with Jane Chatwin."

 

 

It's sort of mind-boggling that Quentin has spent an entire lifetime in Fillory, that he was once crowned its king, and there are still so many places from the books that he has never seen.

The Clock Barrens aren't at all what he's always pictured in his head. He'd envisioned towering trees with cog-toothed leaves on branches like second hands, trees with minute marks etched in their bark and trunks made of machinery. The reality is just a grassy clearing, no bigger than the Mosaic meadow, with a ring of sparse, spindly shrubs lining its edge, none of them any taller than he is.

Its wards shimmer as they step across, and the hum of magic sweeps across his skin. On the other side of the expanse, a cloaked, hooded figure tends the tree directly across the circle.

"Hello, Quentin," Jane calls, absent but bright, keeping her back to them both.

"If she says anything _remotely_ like 'right on time'," Eliot mutters, "I will not be held responsible for my actions."

"And Mr. Waugh. I haven't yet had the pleasure." She turns and steps toward them, tucking a pair of shears into the basket she carries and crossing her hands beneath the handle. "In this life, at any rate. We did cross paths once, in my youth, but you were, in fact, quite dead."

Quentin closes his eyes, a beat longer than a blink, trying to wipe away the image of something still and Eliot-shaped wrapped in their checkerboard quilt. "Was that any better?"

Eliot shrugs, forced at the edges, feigning nonchalance. "Honestly, I have no idea."

They meet in the middle, three hands joined at a clock face center, and the faint ticking that fills the air settles around them like music.

"Well, now. It's delightful to see you boys, together again. The volunteer tomato —" She smiles sharply at Quentin, then turns shrewd eyes to Eliot. "— and the man who lets him grow wild. I do wish it were under different circumstances."

"Do you?" Eliot says flatly. "Sorry if the impending doom has put a damper on our social call."

"El." Quentin closes a hand around his wrist, plants a thumb over his pulse and waits for the pound of it to even out. If it bothers Eliot at all, this grounding touch that's an old habit in their past but entirely new in their present, he doesn't seem to let on.

Holding tight, he shrugs his opposite shoulder in Jane's general direction. "So, um, you probably know that we're on a quest."

She raises an eyebrow. "It hadn't escaped my attention."

Not much does. He's sure of that.

"We're really close," he says. "To actually bringing magic back. We've found all seven keys, we know where Blackspire is. And we're trying to find a way in, but something… we, we _saw_ something. With the last key. Only we don't really know _what._ "

"I see. And you've come to me… why?"

Eliot's tendons tense beneath his fingers, and Quentin squeezes in a way that means he's heard, even silent. _I have this theory_ , he starts to say. But the look in her eyes, searching and expectant and some strange mixture of apologetic and amused, is one he's sure he's seen before — sitting across a desk from yet another version of this woman, one who'd come to take all his memories of magic.

"Because _whatever_ it is we saw," he says instead, hoping like hell he can pass this test, too, "it's the reason you started the time loop in the first place."

Jane stares for a moment, face carefully blank, before she breaks into a wide smile.

"Oh, Quentin, I _am_ pleased," she exclaims, all Eliza again, an intentional echo of that day back at Brakebills. "More than, in fact. It's quite impressive, that you've managed to work so much of it out."

Relief rushes over him, sudden and bracing — in the absence of a puzzle, and a partner, it was once all he'd had to count down his days.

"The locket." Never more than a footnote in the books, never more than a mention on the periphery. And much like the watch, not a gift from Ember at all. Fucking Plover and his artistic license. "That part, I missed."

"Among other things. But impressive, nonetheless." She reaches to her throat, tugs the chain free of her collar to hang over the clasp of her cloak. "It was an inheritance from an unnamed relative, given to me mere days before the first time Rupert brought us through the clock to Fillory. My child's mind thought nothing of it — wandering a new world, I had rather more important mysteries to solve."

Quentin thinks back to the first time he'd ever met Eliza, the strange paramedic who'd handed him a brand new chapter of the story he'd loved for so long, one told in Jane's own words. The one he'd set aside to lose himself in the rush of real magic, and subsequently lost forever.

Who knows what would have been different, what he would have done differently, had he actually paid attention.

"It wasn't until Martin… well. The dwarves took one look at it and gave me this."

Her hand moves to her hip, pulls the watch into view, and suddenly he can see the girl at the Mosaic, impossibly young, determined and unsure, who'd held so much hope of saving her brother.

She presses her lips together and puts the watch away again. "I suppose destiny has plans for us all."

He plants his tongue at the roof of his mouth, swallows hard. _The Watcherwoman_ knows. It's the reason why they're here at all.

"Speaking of," Eliot says, pulling the seventh key from his vest, half reading his mind as always, "if you'll just tell us what unimaginable horrors our future holds, we'll be out of your hair in no time." Quentin's fingers flex around his right wrist, and he shakes his head sharply. "Don't. I heard it."

"Well I can't very well do that, can I?"

Quentin has a handful of not-quite dreams and real-life encounters to draw from, enough to take all her cryptic evasion in stride.

Eliot has no such history, and no amount of pulse point pressure can diffuse the coming explosion.

"Then what the hell is the _point_?" he snaps. "Why bother with any of this, if you won't tell us what the fuck we're supposed to do?"

" _Can't_ , Mr. Waugh, not won't," she answers, unfazed. "What you do is entirely up to you."

Quentin can't hold on, not when he's trembling too much for it to help Eliot at all. As long as he's been chipping away at this, painstakingly piecing all the parts of it together, there's always been one thing — one small word, one big question — left unanswered, looming so large in his mind.

" _When?_ "

She pulls her brows together, looking vexed, as if the answer should be obvious. "The moment you secured the final key, of course."

The words bounce around between his ears, as if repetition will help them make sense.

Shoving his hair out of his face, he shakes his head. "I… I don't understand. Why — nothing _happened_ when we got the final key. Why would you choose that moment to start a _time loop_?"

She sets her basket down in the grass, sighing as she straightens, and nods at the key where it dangles, so disconcerting that Eliot tucks it out of sight again. "I know you have your theories, and I'm well aware what Henry told you. Neither is entirely accurate. The watch is not a time machine, and it certainly isn't all powerful. It's a _marker_ , of sorts. It allows me to set a single checkpoint in the linear flow of time, and return to that checkpoint, should the need arise."

"So…" El spreads his hands. "A time loop."

Jane narrows her eyes. "A time _sketch_. Einstein had it quite correct, insufferable bastard that he was. Every moment to the present is set in stone. Is permanent. But the future has no such limitations. The watch's magic, for all intents and purposes, _presses pause_ on recording the present to provide a kind of preview of what's to come. To sketch the shape of the future, in a way that can either be etched in history or erased from it."

"Oh fuck," Eliot breathes, "we really are time smudges."

"We saw the sketch," Quentin says, his head swimming. "That's what the vision was. Is." He pauses, hoping like hell that she'll tell him which, and the nod he gets in return only sets his teeth on edge. "Which still doesn't explain why you picked that moment as the checkpoint. How would you even know to do that? What if we'd gotten the keys and turned magic back on and, and the world just… went on turning?"

"I'm a slave to English pragmatism, Quentin. I don't deal in what ifs. This course of action was always a gamble, and I've hedged my bets where I could. But what better place to start from scratch? The whole of you, at your strongest point. Just before, as it happens, your weakest."

The hazy aftermath of the vision comes back to him, lurching thick and black through his veins, leeching the warmth from his bones.

She isn't wrong — even at his worst, he's never felt more helpless. Hopeless.

"But we can change it." It's a statement, not a question, because he's low on patience and high on desperation. "That's the whole point of this. Right? That we… _erase_ that future. That we fix it."

Her smile, small and sad, unnerves him more than anything has so far. "I think you'll find that changing it and fixing it are two very different things."

While Quentin struggles to hold on to the last of his patience, Eliot simply lets his go. "Oh for — you know what would be great, if we could just get _one_ straight answer. Just the one."

"Despite what you may believe, Mr. Waugh, I am being as forthcoming as I can." She takes a deep breath, one hand absently toying with the key around her neck. "As I'm sure you've gathered by now, the path back to magic leads to a very old evil."

"Monster," Eliot says, head hanging, hands on his hips. "So we've heard."

"Yes," she tosses back, "and that monster is an evil you do fix in the future." For a moment, everything is as tight as her voice — her mouth, her shoulders, her hand around the locket. "Eventually."

Eliot holds up a finger. "Thank you for that. I was wondering where we fucked up."

Quentin's jaw clenches, the frantic haze of the vision floating at the edge of awareness like a nightmare he can't quite remember. "It's not enough that we fixed it. You're saying that we fixed it _wrong_."

"I'm saying that the fix in the sketch's future comes at a cost."

He snorts. "Then it's no different than anything else."

"And as with anything else, there are acceptable losses. Then there are those that far exceed what you're willing to pay. Those that simply cost too much." Her eyes lock on his, steady and knowing, before flicking to Eliot, and his father's face comes back to him, smiling and sincere and sacrificing everything he has. "This was never going to be free, for any of you. What I'm _saying_ , Quentin, is that you have a chance to pay a price you all can live with."

The words weigh the very air around him, so heavy they settle on his chest like an anvil. He shrugs, just to shake them off, to move some air back into his lungs.

"So we, what… we change the way we fix it."

Jane hums, thoughtful. Resigned. "You weren't wrong in thinking that one minute change is incapable of shifting any significant outcome. The butterfly effect isn't as simple as a single flap of wings, Quentin, it's just the first domino to fall. And the only way to see that chain through to its end is to set it all up correctly. Fixes are final. _Change_ is a process."

"Okay," Quentin says, brows tugged together, "except… how do we even start, um, that, that _process_ , if we don't know what we're supposed to be changing?"

"Easily enough. It's already started. Case in point: we've never had this conversation before."

He blinks, mouth going slack. "But, _wait_ , then… what, what did I —?"

"Oh, you didn't, not directly," she says, and turns bodily, pointedly to Eliot. " _You_ did."

El looks back and forth between them, raising his hands and blowing out an incredulous breath. "I didn't change anything," he says blankly. Which is nonsensical, since he wouldn't know, anyway.

"The sketch acts as its own roadmap. Things will become clearer, of course, once you've deciphered precisely what it is you saw. That said, the watch's magic does come equipped with a fairly useful side effect. Once the checkpoint has passed, the first instance of change that can affect the future is marked by a very distinct sensation." She raises an eyebrow in Eliot's direction. "Call it… _déjà vu._ "

Eliot jerks, just a bit, as if he's dragged his feet across the carpet and gotten a jolt of static electricity.

Quentin takes an unconscious step closer. _Déjà vu,_ comes the whisper in his head. _Peaches and plums, peaches and plums, peaches and plums._

"El —"

"Fuck, I _followed_ _you_." He drags a hand across the back of his neck, his eyes cloudy and dark and full of questions that Quentin can't answer. "Into the den. I, I watched you walk away, and I had this… _feeling_. So. I followed you out."

"And in so doing, prevented the next step in the sketch from unfolding," Jane says. "Hardly a bold stroke, in the grand scheme of things, but it is a start, nonetheless. The first domino in line."

"Jesus," Quentin breathes, fingers curled into the cuffs of his sleeves, all of El's objections and hypotheticals flitting through his brain like butterflies. To know that something so small, something that he'd done, or hadn't, or _almost_ had — _something incredibly brave_ , Eliot echoes in his head, _and equally ill-advised_ — had been the first step toward the shape of a terrible future…

Well. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And apparently, it's the same road that leads back to magic.

Jane tilts her head toward him, in a way that is not unkind. "Perspective is a tricky thing." She swings that soft, knowing look to Eliot, who shifts under the scrutiny. "I think you'll find the smallest moments are bigger and more complex than you know. Hindsight only serves to simplify them, sometimes deceptively so."

Eliot blinks, jaw clenching, then looks away entirely.

She claps her hands together, and the spell is broken.

"At any rate, the watch's early warning system is assistance you will not have again. Remember what it was to trust your instincts. Remember the lessons you've learned from your time on this quest, all you've been told along the way. And use the tools that magic has given you."

"Hate to point out the obvious, but." El spreads his arms. "Magic is _gone_."

"Not the magic you require."

It feels final, as decisive as any of her vague, cryptic words can. But her fingers find the chain around her neck again, almost absently, and Quentin can't quite let it go. Not when it was the impetus for this in the first place.

"What does it do?" he says, quietly. "Um, the, the locket. You told us about the watch, but… I mean, it has to do something, or. _Mean_ something. Right?"

The smile that answers is small and wistful. "There, you see? Trusting your instincts already." She pulls in a big breath. "If the watch is what sketches the future, the locket is what enables one to _see_ it. A sort of microscope to view all the threads of time."

Her fist closes around the shape of the key, and she tugs sharply, until the chain snaps free, then holds it out in her open palm like a present. The clasp is somehow whole and unbroken, a stark reminder that, even in this world without magic, some people are far from powerless.

"As I said. You'll have all the magic you need."

He can feel Eliot tense beside him. Déjà vu, indeed. But as understandable as the reaction is, Quentin's first instinct is to laugh — it actually _is_ a fucking decoder ring.

When he reaches out to take it, it's a point of pride that his hand only shakes a little.

After the weight of each quest key, the scope and size of what it took to secure them, this one feels incredibly small, impossibly light. There is no distinct shape to its handle, no intricate design inset. Just the perfect circle of its outer edge and a scalloped ring along the inside, surrounding an utterly clear lens at its center, like some sort of antique, ornamental loupe.

Not a microscope. A magnifying glass.

"All _what_ threads?" Eliot blurts.

The sudden shift tears Quentin's attention from the key in his hand to El's narrow-eyed confusion, to Jane's flickering, faltering confidence. For a moment her face is full of uncertainty; it's an unsettling expression, on this woman who knows so much.

"That's hardly relevant now."

"Isn't it, though? You said yourself that the watch sets a single checkpoint, _single_ being the operative word. We've established that said checkpoint has passed. And since Q's Doc Brown impression is apparently dead on, this is indeed timeline zero. Hence… what _threads_?"

"A single checkpoint on the _linear_ timeline," she says, brittle. "I believe I included the qualification."

Eliot shrugs. "And splitting that particular hair matters why?"

"Because the flow of linear time is like the trunk of a tree, Mr. Waugh. Solid, central, but given the opportunity, more than capable of branching wildly in new directions. And the watch has no such caveat for branches."

The ticking that surrounds them seems to deepen, rhythmic and resonant, making Quentin spin slowly in place to chase the passing of seconds.

Though the little trees are set in a perfect circle, there aren't twelve of them, as he'd initially assumed — carrying the metaphor as literally as only Fillory can — but eight, each of them with a tiny clock embedded in its bark.

"You planted paradoxes," he says, dull and full of dread, completing the rotation just in time to catch her nod. "On _purpose_."

Eliot's inhales sharply at his side. "Oh shit," he mutters. " _Literally_ hedged her bets."

"As many as thirty-nine, at one point." Her tone is clipped and cool, crisply matter-of-fact. "All of them immensely helpful, in their own way. Those that remain each contain a timeline where one or more of you is still alive. They need to be tended, pruned, or they'll outgrow their usefulness."

"Their _use_ —" Quentin's face twists, bitterness flooding his tongue. "We're not fucking _puppets_. You realize those are people's _lives_ that you're playing with, right? _Our._ Lives."

"I realize that, in the alternative, you all would've been dead dozens of times over." She cocks her head. "Would you rather I had gone that route?"

" _Penny_ is dead. He's dead."

"And yet, you still _have_ one." She shakes her head, as if this is all inconsequential. "In addition to another Marina at your disposal, access to an Alice who possessed the knowledge needed in order to save your own, and the alternate version of yourself who brought you the final key. All of that, from just _one_ secondary timeline."

"You didn't just make _one_!" he exclaims. "It was bad enough when I thought we were dying over and over for some kind of, of _bigger goddamn purpose_ , but… You made thirty-nine different versions of us. _Killed_ thirty-nine different versions of us. For no better reason than, what? _Spare parts_?"

He scrubs a hand over his mouth, thinking of the Penny who had lost everything and the Alice who had been so shattered and the Quentin who had destroyed them all. Eight timelines with at least one of them left, likely broken beyond repair.

When he laughs, hoarse, near hysterical, he sounds nothing like himself.

"Is magic really worth… all this? Stopping _one_ fucking monster. Is that worth it?"

"In a word? Yes." She steps forward, eyes incensed and imploring all at once. "We talked about acceptable losses, Quentin, and this is the very definition. Those timelines were a means to an end. That end is upon you now, and that _bigger purpose_ you mentioned is about much more than a single monster. It's about protecting us all from the monsters you have yet to meet. It's about magic existing as the universe intended, without being controlled or perverted or weaponized on a catastrophic scale. It's about preventing the world as we know it from falling to ruin. And that is worth whatever I have to give. The cost has already included my life. Forgive me for attempting to keep it to _copies_ of yours."

Quentin presses his lips together and tips his head back to the sky, and Eliot's hand closes around his elbow, steady and warm.

"Q, let's go," he says, soft. Careful. "We got what we came for, and then some. Let's go."

He tugs, just a bit, and Quentin tightens his fist around the little locket until it stabs at his skin. What they came for. He can only assume that the fresh wave is nausea is the _then some_.

"What else? Did I miss?" He drops his head, makes himself meet Jane's guarded eyes. "The locket, _among other things_. What _other things_ am I missing?"

Her head shifts, so she's facing him squarely. "As a word of caution, you shouldn't ask questions you don't really wish to have answered."

"Are you… _Seriously_?" He grins, bitter and incredulous, and briefly wonders if it looks as ugly as it feels. "Does it _get_ much worse than thirty-nine timelines worth of human sacrifice? Because I kind of doubt it."

"It might," she says. "For you."

Eliot's hand tightens on his arm. Quentin comes dangerously close to shaking it off.

"Just, fucking… _what else_?"

"This magic… it's hardly an exact science. And time is so very fickle in Fillory." She sniffs, flicking her gaze to the ground. "You lived out your days here, once. And at the end of your life, you arranged to have the first key delivered to Margo, with a message that, in turn, delivered her to me. I then sent her to back to Brakebills to retrieve the Mosaic's key, which had been buried with my body."

Eliot sighs wearily. "You want to tell us something we don't know?"

"Not particularly," she snaps back, "but here we are." She raises her chin and adjusts the cloak clasped at her neck, movements meant to be haughty and self-possessed that only feel fragile and small. "The bunnies you received, the ones that informed you of Margo's impending wedding, they were sent _hours_ before they actually arrived. Before the first one had even landed on Earth, she was already making her way across the campus, with both keys in tow."

Quentin fades back a step, two, only stops when El's reach tethers him in place.

"For all it may seem that the quest sent you back to the moment before you stepped through the clock, I assure you, that is not the case. Where linear time is concerned, Margo was _always_ moving forward. Her present just happened to coincide with a point in your past. And as a result, all the events thereafter were… overwritten."

_The whine makes him irrationally fond, in its single drawn-out syllable, lingering evidence of the little boy that won't be much longer._

_"Come on, they're gonna leave me."_

_Unexpected, that sentiment in this context, and it steals his breath long enough that he needs backup._

_"Not a chance." A big hand smooths down the back of a tawny head, and that voice chimes in again, firm and fond and far too knowing. "Like any respectable child of mine, you are the very life of the party."_

_"But… I'm your only child."_

_A thoughtful, tragic hum. "Heavy lies the crown."_

_Recovered just enough, his hands find slight shoulders and hold, hands that have always kept him as close as one keeps anything irreplaceable. "If you get back and we're not here —"_

_"Which won't be an issue, will it, since you're headed to the beach for Sibylle's birthday, not headed off to war."_

_"Humor me." It's addressed as much to father as to son, this plea for a call and response, even as that voice silently says_ let go _. "If we're not here, what do you do?"_

 _"I_ know _, Daddy." The roll of big brown eyes loosens the knot in his chest. "I find Gram at the orchard and give her your letter."_

_The affection in amber eyes, the understanding, makes his heart hurt all over again._

_"And you remember that we love you, kiddo." That voice, full of everything they've built, pressed to the crown of Teddy's hair to trap the words inside his head. "Always and forever, wherever we are."_

"You —" All the air leaves his lungs at once, though he can't quite remember exhaling — it just seems to evaporate, as if it's escaped through a million little leaks in his pores, until there's nothing whatsoever left to breathe.

He blinks back to the moment, to the key in Eliot's hand, there one second and utterly gone the next. El shifts that same hand and fills it with Quentin's, their fingers lacing together and locking tight.

"You mean it never happened."

"I mean that it happened," Jane says, "and then it did not. You maintain the memories, as dictated by the quest's unique brand of magic. But in the course of time marching on, as it must… this was the casualty."

Everything in Quentin goes a little cold, a little numb. _Casualty_ , as if this is something that's died. As if that's at all possible.

To die, it would have to have lived first.

He's just beginning to come to terms with the fact that this quest might cost him his father. In the here and now, with that life long over, he'd never imagined that it would finally cost him his son.

There's a tremor in his hand, where it's tangled in Eliot's, shaking no matter how hard he squeezes.

It just isn't coming from him.

Quentin looks to his left as if moving through water, and the familiar profile has never felt so foreign — frozen and blank, eyes closed and jaw clenched, throat working beneath his dimpled chin. He knows the play of El's features from just about every angle, at almost every age, full of every emotion he can think of. But he has never seen this face before.

"Fuck you," Eliot chokes, thick and wet and gutting. "Do you even… God, _fuck you_. And all your string-pulling bullshit."

"You say that now. As I believe you'll feel differently in the not-so-distant future, allow me to tug this last little thread." Her voice is strained, strung together with her strange kind of sympathy and something curiously like compassion. "A dead hero helps no one. But it's entirely possible to be both smart _and_ brave, Eliot. In fact, there are times when it is absolutely imperative."

"Yeah, we're done with the fortune cookie wisdom." El's eyes had flown open at the sound of his name, fixed on her with enough fire to burn through time itself. "We're done with this whole goddamn conversation. And I hope to hell we never have it again."

"Then it's just as well that we won't," she says, with an absolute certainty that fills Quentin's gut with lead. "A single checkpoint, a single reset."

He blows out a breath, feeling lightheaded and impossibly heavy everywhere else. The weight in one hand is heaviest of all — this tiny magnifying glass, trained on them across time, focus pinpointed until they burn like ants.

He shoves the key and its trailing chain into his pocket.

"So on top of… _all that_ ," he says, "we only have one chance to get this right."

"One chance is all the watch's magic is capable of. I pray that it will be enough." She raises a hand, even as Eliot turns on his heel and tugs him along after. "Goodbye, Quentin."

 

 

They're still in motion when they land, Quentin tripping over his own feet and stumbling into the arm of the sofa.

She'd sent them straight back, no trip through the clock necessary. He'd be grateful for that, at least — spared the long walk back to the portal tree, the slog through opium and oppressive emotion and Eliot's stifling silence over the static inside his head — if he didn't genuinely hate her so much right now.

His hand is still caught in Eliot's, their fingers curled together though their arms are outstretched, pulled taut in opposite directions. All at once it isn't enough, this single point of contact, and he wants nothing more than to fall forward and fold into Eliot, tucked to his chest, head beneath his chin, until he can't tell which broken heartbeat belongs to him.

He flicks fog-smothered eyes up to El's face, and Eliot twists his mouth into something tight and terrible, and _tugs._

"What the _hell_ happened to you two?"

Margo's voice cracks through the room like a whip, while there's still half a gulf between them, and Quentin lurches to a stop and tips his head down to the hardwood.

The group had been planted around the dining room table when they'd made their way through the lounge to the clock, pouncing on pizza Penny-23 had traveled in from the city with all the hunger of those desperate for distraction.

It had been a good sound, the chorus of their restless energy — Kady hissing _shit, that's hot_ around her first bite, Josh trying to pinpoint some spice in the sauce, Penny's _dude, no one cares_ and Margo's mouth-full laughter and the scrape of a fork on a plate that could only be Alice  — and it all feels very far away, at the moment.

"I figured you'd fucked off to fight about whatever half-cocked idea Quentin came up with," Margo says, shifting just inside the edge of his eyeline. "Or just to fuck, which I'd be more inclined to forgive."

His head comes up at that, in time to see her look pointedly to their linked hands and linger.

There's no telling whether Eliot had finally fessed up or if she and her shiny new fairy eye and it's magical scope of sight had worked out the gist herself. But it figures, that she knows now, when it doesn't matter anymore, anyway.

Eliot sighs, worn thin and weary. "I did leave a note."

"Yeah, I got that." Her tone is a blade, both flat and pointed in that effortless way she's forged and sharpened and honed to perfection. One hand comes up, holding a little paper square. "What exactly was this shit supposed to tell me, Eliot?"

Curious despite himself, Quentin plucks the cocktail napkin from her grasp.

 _Went to see a girl about a thing_ , it reads, in El's flowy, familiar scrawl. _Back in a jiff. (In the event that we aren't, it's possible that we've completely screwed the time/space continuum, so. Good luck with that.)_

The puff of laughter spills out of him, bitter and ugly, and he pulls his fingers free and fades back toward the fireplace, note fluttering to the floor.

"Q —"

"Whatever, it's…" He trails off, because it isn't fine and won't ever be. But they don't have time for this, irony of ironies, and of all the emotions churning through his chest, grief is the one that can wait. "It is what it is. Let's just. Figure out the next step."

Eliot shakes his head. "We don't have to do this now."

" _Don't we_ , Eliot?" He throws his arms wide. "I mean, _time marches on._ "

In the absence of the contact Quentin had craved, there's a strange sort of satisfaction in watching Eliot flinch. But it's fleeting, and leaves something shameful and empty behind — that life hadn't been his alone, and its loss isn't, either. He's just the one of them who can't seem to let go.

_They'd buried her beneath the big tree at the edge of the clearing, not quite maple but not entirely oak, the one that Teddy always ducked behind during hide and seek. So he could always find her. So he never had to hide alone._

_The passage of time has almost rewound itself — a year gone by has let the grass grow in again, erased the raw edge of a grave, a shape already hazy in his head. It had been nothing but bare, black soil on what would have been their anniversary, so few days old he couldn't count them off in weeks. Her birthday had seen it blanketed in freshly fallen leaves, patches of slow, frost-stunted growth peeking out from underneath. Now the only thing that marks the spot is a wide, flat stone, worn smooth by the river, laid flush with the ground._

_And Eliot, crouched down at its side._

_"Teddy lost his first tooth the other day. Just when I think he's hit peak cuteness, there's a brand new hole in his mouth that's bloody but somehow adorable."_

_He watches him clear the headstone as he talks — plucking out the overgrowth, pulling all the weeds away, as if he's moved through the motions a hundred times before._

_"About halfway through the tale of the Tooth Fairy, it occurred to me that we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I can't decide if the ensuing panic was good parenting or just good old-fashioned paranoia, but for all I know there actually is some room-creeping, tooth-stealing fairy flitting invisibly through Fillory, and when it comes to mixing fairies with offspring, I've already been that cautionary tale." Careful hands split a long leaf down the center in thin, curling ribbons, tear the halves in half again. "Ridiculous story short, should Teddy ever mention the Ferrari that took his tooth and left him a present, don't freak out, it's an Earth thing. What can I tell you, honey, I tried."_

_With the flick of a finger the pieces of leaf plait themselves together in thin air, homage to an old habit. Standing here in the shadow of the forest, of honesty and old habits and grief-tinged humor, it's impossible not to feel like an intruder._

_"They're trying, too. Some days are a breeze, but some days are a bitch, and the breezier the good days are, the bitchier the bad ones get." There's an exhale, the bob of a dark head. "They just… they miss you. Doesn't matter which day. And I'm kind of a shitty substitute, so. Everybody's trying."_

_The little braid floats down to the headstone, tiny petals tucked within its weaving. One knee sinks to the ground, one palm pressed soft and reverent to the grass beside it._

_"For what it's worth… they aren't the only ones. Who miss you."_

Quentin hadn't seen his face that day — he'd backed silently toward the cottage until he could make enough noise from enough distance to telegraph his presence. But it's as painful to look at him now as it had been to hear him then, the moment he realized the fog of mourning he’d been stumbling through for a year was far too thick to be the only one lost. That he'd missed something that should have been so obvious.

 _She was impossible not to like_ , he'd told his father. Sharply soft, salty sweet. So perfectly balanced between Margo and Fen, each and neither, that she'd slotted right into the empty space in Eliot's heart that had quietly ached for them both.

He drags both palms down his face, digs his fingertips into his eyes. "Where is everybody?"

"Fuck if I know. Around?" He drops his hands to glare at Margo in a way he's never really dared before, and she crosses her arms, cocking her head and doubling down on annoyance. " _Around_ , Quentin, it's not my goddamn day to babysit."

"Bambi," Eliot says softly, reaching out to hold her shoulders. "Give us a sec and gather the troops. We'll explain everything, I promise."

After a tense, endless moment, she spins on her heel.

"Get your shit together," she says, and goes, muttering the whole way out. "Christ on a crackpipe, I run a _kingdom_ that's less high maintenance than you two motherfuckers."

She's barely gone before Quentin is in motion, pacing the space between the window and the wall.

"We need a game plan here, Eliot. We don't even know how much time we have until the next thing we're supposed to change."

"Q…"

"It's not like she told us how this _works_ ," he says, digging the chain from his pocket. "Or anything else that's actually useful. " He can hear Margo's muffled yelling from the hallway above their heads, the pound of her palm on closed doors. "Maybe… I don't know, maybe we have to look at the key _through_ this one? But do we use the vision key or the time key? Or both? Or… neither, I —"

"Q."

"Maybe we just… _think_ _vision-y thoughts_ at it until they make sense. Maybe the damn thing is some kind of magical projector, and we can make fucking _popcorn_ and watch it like a movie." There are more footsteps upstairs now, sturdier than Margo's stilettos. "Though, you know, that presents another problem. I'm not sure if it's magical enough to operate on its own, or if I'm supposed to, to _activate_ it somehow, with the single shred of magic I have."

" _Quentin_." Eliot grabs for his wrists as he goes by again. "Stop."

This time, the punch of laughter aches a little when it leaves. "I can't, I can't stop. If I do, I'll..."

Stall out, never to start again. Maybe just cease to be, like the fifty years they both remember but never actually existed, the ones he should label _life comma happy_ and shove in a box with all the other fantasies about Fillory that have since proven false.

"El, I can't stop," he says, and it sounds like _please, please don't make me_. "We don't have _time_."

Eliot reaches out to smooth the hair out of Quentin's face, slides his hand down to curl around the back of his neck. "Okay," he says, pulling with just enough pressure that Quentin's bent head bumps his collarbone. "Okay."

The rolling sound of feet on the stairs is the first sign that they're not alone. The little locket in his hand is the stark, screaming reminder that this is much, much bigger than the two of them.

He clears his throat and shuffles back, just as everyone else files in.

Kady drops to the sofa behind the bar with a huff. "Guess we're just calling meetings in the middle of the night now."

Quentin turns to blink out the window, registering the pitch blackness for the first time since they've been back. It had already been late when they left, but the Clock Barrens had been bright and sunny and green.

"Oh," he says, dazed. "I… Sorry."

Ever the devil's advocate, Margo rolls her eyes in Kady's general direction. "It's like twelve thirty," she sneers. "Suck it up."

Propped on the library ladder, Penny slowly crosses his arms. "You found something."

"Not found," Eliot amends. Everything about him seems steadier than Quentin feels, but he's poured himself a tumbler of something dark and translucent and several fingers full. " _Saw_. Though we're not entirely sure what."

"The fuck does that mean?"

"It's, um," Quentin stammers, scrubbing one hand across his forehead. "Okay, bare minimum, broad strokes version, uh… everything we know about the timelines is a lie, finishing the quest comes with a seriously fucked up future, and we have to figure out a way to _change_ that future before we can bring magic back."

His wandering eyes find five blank faces and Eliot's _oh honey, no_ cringe, and Josh puts a hand up from his spot on the floor.

" _Yeah_ ," he says, "I have questions. Namely —"

"The _fuck_ does that mean?" Penny repeats, almost as sharp as the Penny he isn't. "Do better than broad strokes, Coldwater. What about the timelines?"

Quentin links his hands across the back of his neck, trying to find a way to tell 23 that he's basically the byproduct of some horrible horomancy contingency plan. "That's… actually not as pressing as, um, but I get why you would… Okay, when, when you consider the concept of a stable time loop —"

"We aren't the fortieth," Eliot chimes in. "Timeline. We're the _first_. There are thirty-nine others, or _were_ , at one point. But we are version one-point-oh. Which is an issue that could probably use its own wiki, but also isn't really the relevant part of this." Sinking to the arm of the nearest sofa, he glances across the room to Quentin, who beams back waves of sheer relief across the distance. "The monster that modern-day Calypso and Q's evil twin mentioned in the vaguest, most cryptic way possible? Not a metaphor. An _actual_ _monster_. And apparently, once we buy our way into Blackspire and flip the magic switch, it's the apocalyptic gift with purchase."

Margo plants her hands on her hips and cocks her head to one side, her eyes almost comically wide.

"Fucking _what_?"

"How would you even know that?" Alice leans forward from her seat in the corner, her eyebrows drawn together. "How can you know _any_ of that?"

Eliot puts up a finger. "And there's the million-dollar question. _First_ , we had a visual aid," he says, pausing to pull the final key from his vest pocket and look pointedly at Margo. "Then we just had to phone a friend."

Quentin can see the moment it clicks, when she connects the key in El's hand with the note he had left. But someone still needs to read in the rest of them. And if _someone_ is him, he needs to do it without spiraling wildly into oblivion.

He takes a deep breath, another, and Eliot catches his eye and nods, just a bit. Just enough.

"We had a vision, from the last key," he says, "just like… _Beast me_ did. Only it's this tangled mess of images we can't understand. I'd had… I'd been working on this theory, about the time loops, so. We went to see the Watcherwoman. Jane Chatwin. Turns out the theory was basically correct — there was only ever _one_ time loop, one she created to do more than stop The Beast. And we were still in it."

Alice's eyes narrow. "We _were_."

A statement, not a question — it isn't confirmation she's after, it's explanation. Alice never did have much use for the _what_ s and _when_ s and _why_ s of things, even before her time as a niffin. She might have gone without the word this time, but the _how_ is still heavily implied.

"The loop ended when we finally got the key from the fairy realm. Jane set it there as a failsafe, I guess, in case we… fucked up the end of the quest."

"Spoiler alert," El says, bone dry, "we fuck up the end of the quest."

Penny snorts. "There's a shocker."

" _Okay_ , we get it, the real fuck ups were the friends we made along the way," Margo snaps. "How the hell do we _fix it_?"

Eliot hums, sipping his drink. "I take it back. _That_ is the million-dollar question." The rest of the room looks at him expectantly, and his mouth drops open as he straightens. "Oh, I don't actually have the answer to that one. Though not for lack of trying."

"We _do_ , though," Quentin counters. "We just… can't make sense of it yet. Which is where _this_ comes in."

Quentin brings up his right hand, where the chain dangles from his fingers. The locket at its end catches the light, and for maybe the first time in this whole conversation, Kady looks almost interested.

"What the hell is that?"

"Wait, is there an _eighth key_ now?" Josh looks around at each of them. "Am I the only one feeling a little betrayed by the book?"

Quentin shakes his head. "It's not a quest key," he says. "This is… something else."

"Like a 'one key to rule them all' situation?"

Margo steps carefully closer and squints at the locket, watching it sway like a pendulum. "Whatever it is," she says, hazy and half-hypnotized, "it's like looking into a black hole."

Behind her, Eliot pulls his brows together. "As in dark and inescapable? Because that doesn't really bode well for things like our future."

"As in _endless_." She glances back to catch his eye. "Beautiful nothing."

El seems to shudder, then goes completely still, his face a faraway mix of confusion and recognition and blink-and-you'll-miss-it fear.

"Well that sounds promising," Penny deadpans. "That thing come with some kind of instruction manual, or is how it actually works another one of those things you _don't quite know_?"

Quentin opens his mouth, unsure of how to answer — mostly because, well, he's not wrong — and Alice springs from her seat, arms folded tight across her middle.

"You _tried_ the vision key when Josh and Julia first brought it back. And it didn't work."

"Um, El had a thought on that. You know how the book would only reveal the next chapter, the, the clues on how to find the next key, once we'd found the current one? We think this is pretty much the same thing. That the final key's power wasn't active until we got the key that should have come before."

Alice frowns, the one that means she's contemplating, not the one that means she's about to argue a counterpoint. "That's… surprisingly plausible."

"Yeah, well, broken clock. But cheers." Eliot mimes a toast in her direction, then stares into the bottom of his glass, slowly swirling the little liquid that's left. "And since you're the biggest brain in this operation, Alice, any bright ideas on how we're supposed to use this thing? I assume we can't just rub it and make a wish."

She starts forward, stops, starts again, watching Quentin cautiously as she reaches. Seems his quest book possessiveness, and the passive-aggressive blowout that followed, hasn't been forgotten by either of them.

He drops it into her open palm before he can second-guess himself, and she holds it up to the light, turning it over and back. "I can't tell what the center is made of, but it's biconvex. Ellipsoid. Maybe tri-layered? I think, I mean, it's… it's basically a lens."

"That was my first thought, too. Like a, a watchmaker's loupe. Which, you know, considering the source —"

"No, Q, an _anatomical_ lens," she corrects. "Like an _eye_."

Kady arches an eyebrow. "And you know that how?"

The answer, of course, is that Alice is essentially a lens, herself — complex and infinitely layered, capable of laser focus and looking too close and bending light to her will in ways that no glass can. He remembers the weeks after she discovered her discipline, a white-blonde head buried in books on optics and refraction, on prismatic illusions.

Lip trapped in her teeth, she looks up at him with a small shrug and a smaller smile.

"Phosphoromancy, bitches."

Laughter leaks out of him without asking, little more than a stuttering puff of air. But for a second, the world is new again, full of wonder and possibility and magic.

The world he'd broken.

"That tracks, actually." He clears his throat, hoping it will round out the thinness in his voice. "The um, the eye thing. Jane said it was a way to… _see the threads of time_. To see the future."

"Good to know," Margo says. "We still have zero clue how to get through the goddamn looking glass."

Alice shoves at her glasses and squints back to the locket and doesn't acknowledge the irony in that statement at all. "What happened," she asks, "when you had the vision?"

"Besides, um, having the vision?" He shrugs. "Nothing."

Her face scrunches in a way he knows well, searching for whatever patience looks like but settling on sharp and exasperated. "What did you _do_ , Quentin."

"Just… held the key?"

"Fine." She nods. "Show me."

There's a flare of pure panic at the thought, the phantom hand of aftermath closing tight around his spine. His eyes dart up, land on Eliot's frozen face, and for a moment, it's like looking in a mirror.

In all their desperation to find a way to see the vision, they'd somehow forgotten that they'd have to _see the vision._

Now it hangs over their heads like a storm cloud — dark and ominous, ready to burst.

"Uh… yeah. Sure."

Quentin takes a deep breath and makes himself move, around the sofa and across the floor, Alice on his heels. The key hangs heavy from Eliot's hand, suspended by the tag between his knuckles, and he reaches up to take it and tries not to notice how carefully El avoids contact — with the key, with his skin, with his cautious line of sight.

It's warm.

All the keys are, really — most mildly so, though the truth key is almost hot to the touch and the key from the abyss burns like holding dry ice and the time key seems to pulse with its own current, as if it conducts magic like other elements conduct electricity.

But this is warmth from being wrapped in Eliot's hand, just a moment ago, before they'd both remembered why touch should be terrifying.

Alice is frowning again, the compound frown that means she's thinking and frustrated and completely unsure what comes next. "Did you do something that could have triggered it somehow? Or, or _say_ something? What were the circumstances?"

He closes the key in his hand, and the press of disappointment is almost painful — he hasn't trusted her this much in months, and she hasn't looked at him with this much hope since… _before_.

"It just happened," he says, quiet, as if it will soften the blow. "I know it's a magical object, but… It wasn't like a _spell_ , Alice. I swear, we just touched it."

"What if it _was_?" Eliot eyes finally find his, questioning. "A spell. Even if it… didn't mean to be."

Quentin shakes his head, too sharp — he can still feel the gift of Julia's magic coursing through him, golden and gleaming, growing restless. Whatever had prompted the vision, it hadn't been premature casting on his part.

Margo's gaze rolls back and forth between them, favoring her fairy eye, but whatever she sees isn't faster than Alice Quinn's train of thought.

"Wait," she says, holding up a hand. "When you say 'we' — _we_ touched it and, and _we_ had a vision… You mean _you_ touched the key, either before or after Eliot did? Or do you mean that you touched it _together_?"

"Oh, I…"

He trails off, blinking the memory back to life around the broken blank spot of the thing they're trying like hell to decipher. "El, um, he touched it first, then he handed it to me, and —"

All at once, he can see Eliot's mask of feigned annoyance so clearly in his mind, careful and comforting and cracking with concern at the edges. The feel of fingers brushing his, a whisper of warmth tangible enough to give him goosebumps, becomes a blaring loop of feedback when Eliot's hand wraps tight around his wrist.

"Nothing happened," Eliot says, his realization dawning aloud while Quentin's rolls over him in stunned, dumbstruck silence. "Nothing _happened_ , Q, not until… I touched you. When I tried to take it back."

Alice tilts her head, just a bit, at the sight of Eliot's grip on his arm, and the frown that settles on her face is one he can't quite read. Then she nods, her expression settling into cool, clinical precision.

"Together, then," she says, and nods. "So it's some kind of contact-fueled collaborative magic."

El's voice comes back to him then, a past sense amplified by the sight of him here and now, the touch of skin on his skin. _We're all on this quest, Quentin, it is a group fucking project_. Holding on to its echo, he can't quite hear Jane's voice. But her words are there, too, floating through his head, seeping into the space between his ears like vapor. _Remember the lessons you've learned,_ she'd said, _all you've been told along the way._

He locks onto Eliot's whiskey-warm eyes, twists his hand 'til he can find El's pulse with his fingertips, and conjures the greatest lesson he's learned since he discovered that magic was real, maybe the single most meaningful thing he's ever been told.

 _You are not alone, here_.

"In that case," he answers, "I might have an idea."

 

 

"Is this actually going somewhere," Penny grinds out, "or are we just gonna play ring around the rosie like it's goddamn recess?"

Quentin pulls what he needs from his bag, then turns from the chest in the corner back to the room, where the sofas and tables have been shoved to the walls and the rest of the group stands in a ring of anxious energy. He steps into his space in the circle — Alice at his left, Eliot on his right — tucks his hair behind his ears and takes a deep breath.

"Here's the thing," he says. "I sort of… have. Magic."

Josh's jaw drops and Kady stands up straighter and Penny's eyebrows shoot sky high, but Margo rolls her eyes and turns to shove at Eliot's arm.

" _That's_ what all the eye fucking is about? You've gone full Deathly goddamn Hallows 'cause Harry got his groove back?"

"I'm not _entirely_ sure I understand that reference," Eliot answers, "but I'm almost positive that it's wrong."

"How?" Quentin glances to his left, and Alice blinks back, vexed and confused. "I know you wouldn't just… just snort some fairy. So how can you have magic, Quentin?"

There's an accusation in her tone, and just beneath it, something more betrayed than she has any right to be, considering the siphon and the Library subterfuge and the power beneath his skin that's only possible because she hadn't died trying to keep it.

He wraps his arms around himself, clutching his sides with hands that hold magic, and misses Julia so much it aches.

"Jules gave it to me," he says, and it's miraculously not as defensive as he feels. "Enough for a one-off spell. In case, you know. We needed it."

Penny chuckles, but there's no amusement in it. "Hell of a lot of 'just in case' happening here. What's one spell really gonna do?"

 _Julia started with a single spell_ , he wants to say, _and now she's a goddamn goddess._

"That's the thing. Jane said we had to use the tools that magic has given us, that we'd have all the magic we needed. The keys _are_ magic, they're magical objects. Not sure it gets more… tool-like than that. And I think the little juice I have might be enough to act like an amplifier."

"Meaning…" Josh shakes his head, eyes wide. "What?"

"Well, the key's magic is cooperative —"

"In _theory_ ," Alice cuts in, brittle and sharp, as if the one in question hadn't been hers to begin with.

"Our theories have been panning out, of late." Eliot sighs, with a weariness Quentin's only ever heard with age. "What are you suggesting, Q?"

_He stands back to watch for a few quiet, indulgent moments — the hypnotic motion of those hands, twisting into tuts that till tidy rows in the dirt, sunlight glinting in silver-streaked hair — before he's caught, and he fades back to the daybed, holding out a cup of spell-chilled water as a cover._

_"You know the magic's doing most of this, right? It's not like I'm out working the fields all day."_

_The sentiment is achingly familiar, even if this particular objection is new, this unprompted downplay of the effort that's kept them fed every day for decades._

_"I can't just appreciate the view?"_

_It gets the reaction he's after; the spark of surprise, the slow, sly smirk. And the swell of warmth in his chest that never stops growing, season after season, without any magic at all._

_"Anytime, baby. Objectify away."_

Quentin shakes off the memory to give him a shrug and a smile, both small and tight and about as much as he can offer at the moment.

"Basically? Vulcan mind meld." He untucks his arms, revealing the keys curled in each hand. "This one showed us the sketch of the future," he says, holding up the vision key, "and the locket will let us understand it. But _this_ one —" he waves a bit with the other hand, its key folded in the cuff of his sleeve "— made it possible for us all to hear each other. More than once. Maybe, with a little boost, we can find a way to let us all, you know. _See_."

He looks around at each of them, trying to gauge their faith — in the idea specifically, but at least a little bit him in general. Shockingly, it's 23 who pipes up first.

"Whitney's Collective Consciousness," he rumbles, begrudgingly, from across the circle. "I wasn't in the Psychic house much, in my timeline, but. They'd use it sometimes, to link up energy, have lucid dream thought orgies, woo woo shit like that. Could work — it needs touch to trigger."

Kady cocks her head. "It's not the worst plan we've ever had."

"No, that would be the deicide that got us into this mess in the first place." Alice turns to look squarely at him, and must see just how much it stings, since she starts looking everywhere but. "If it _doesn't_ work, we've wasted our only shot at a backup spell."

"Which you didn't even know existed until fifteen fucking seconds ago," Margo says. "So unless you've got a better idea, how 'bout we go with keyception and let Ariadne lead us out of the goddamn labyrinth."

Josh screws up his face. "I feel like we're mixing more metaphors than usual."

"Please," she scoffs, "between the gods and the monsters, we're already balls deep in mythology. Quentin's incidental Ellen Page hair is just a bonus."

Eliot shifts at the periphery, deliberate, bringing Quentin's eyes over to his carefully neutral face.

"As presentations go, I think we're well beyond slideshows and magical projectors," he says, even and easy enough to every ear but a knowing few. "You sure you're up for this?"

Quentin almost laughs — the thought of inviting half a dozen people into the maze of his mind would be a nightmare on a _good_ day, one with magic but without the mess of quest-fueled fear and longing and desperate, anxious energy. Add the suffocating grief of a life unlived, and it'll be a miracle if there's any room for them at all.

The part of his brain that's irrational and hurting and full of rage screams _sure, I'm totally up for handing out front row seats to all my pain and powerlessness and pathetic pining for a man who doesn't want me._

He shrugs a little, instead. "It's kind of the only plan we've got, so… guess I'm gonna have to be."

Catching the string to the vision key's tag, he carefully passes it over to Eliot. He hands the unity key off to Alice, buffered by a pleat in her skirt. The locket lens hangs around his neck, feeling larger than it is and heavier than it should.

Penny walks him through the tuts twice, then fades back to his place. The spell is simple enough, one that begins with Popper 24 and becomes the unfurling of overlaid hands at forehead level, to mimic a third eye opening. The movement of his fingers feels foreign for a moment — they may have had magic at the Mosaic, but these hands haven't moved this way in months.

The third time is the charm — he can feel the spell spark through his veins and pool in his palms, ready to burst from his fingertips. It makes him pause for a moment, to breathe and think of fireworks, of the second spell he'd ever done.

"Um," he says, brows drawn down, "should I, like… _clear my mind_ or something?" As if he could. As if his brain has ever cooperated before. "Or, I don't know, do something to make myself more receptive?"

"Seriously?" Penny scoffs. "It's not rocket science, fucking reach out and _touch someone_."

"Right." Quentin rolls his fingers, trying to ignore the way his stomach lurches sideways. "Right, okay."

Blowing out a breath, he raises a hand and reaches for Alice, and she jerks back as if she's been burned before he's moved more than an inch.

" _Wait_ , Q, just, Jesus," she grumbles, shoving her other hand into Josh's. "It's a contact-driven spell, you might want to make sure we've all _actually made contact_ before you start."

Josh nods, head jerking pointedly around the circle. "Does everyone have their vision buddy?"

" _Yes_ , Hoberman," Margo mutters, "we're all hand fucking in the world's worst daisy chain." She throws up both her fists, taking one of El's and one of Penny's along for the ride. "Can we press play on the preview of our fucked-up future, already?"

Quentin nods, watching Alice slip the unity key from the folds of her skirt to meet her bare skin. The little buzz of awareness there'd been both times before doesn't come at all, and he blinks over to Eliot, at a loss.

El shakes his head. "We're all here. Maybe the key magic knows we don't need to talk to each other when we can just, you know, _talk to each other_."

It sounds reasonable enough. But they _aren't_ all here, not really, and the words make the silence something worse, something _empty_ , like a hole in his head, the shape of the space where Julia should be.

"Yeah," he mumbles, "maybe."

Eliot's face flashes with careful, knowing concern, an expression as familiar as their friendship and older than their other life, one that might feel like pity from anyone else but has never once made Quentin feel anything but seen. It's gone as fast as it appeared, and his eyes drift down to the key resting in El's open palm, stretched out in the space between them.

He sucks in a deep breath and makes himself look at everyone, _anyone_ , else. "Just so you know," he says, hands hovering, "this is probably going to suck."

Then he moves, making contact — left hand locking onto Alice's, right hand closing over Eliot's — and braces for the onslaught of anguish and torment and bleak, black future, of whatever's waiting for them on the other side of failure.

He's still holding his breath when Josh clears his throat and cracks open one squinty eye.

"So… did anyone else not get a vision?"

Margo throws him a glare that could melt glass. "Do the rest of us _look_ fucking enlightened?"

"Well that sucks," he muses, unfazed. "Though, to be fair, we were warned."

"I don't know what happened," Quentin says, hanging on by a thread. Still, none of them have let go. "Probably because I, just. Don't know what the hell I'm _doing_. I thought… I don't know. I must've screwed up the spell, somehow."

Penny shakes his head. "Not that I saw. And I'd sure as hell tell you."

Alice blinks behind her glasses and chews at her lower lip, like she's trying to tamp down the _I told you so_. "We should give it some time," she says, flexing her fingers around the key trapped between their palms. "Maybe it takes a minute."

Quentin winces, remembering a sudden rush of chaos at the barest brush of contact.

"Yeah," Eliot answers, for the both of them. "Not so much."

"Then what?" Kady raises an eyebrow. "Do we even have a Plan B?"

Quentin's mouth drops open as if he actually has an answer for her, as if that hadn't been the only half-feasible thought he could manage, as if he isn't in so far over his head that he's drowning. He can feel Eliot's hand in his, held tight, thumb sweeping a slow path across his knuckles, and tries to let it be enough of a lifeline that he can come up with another way out of this.

When the light bulb goes off, it isn't in his head, it's standing right in front of him.

"Pretty sure the Plan B ship has sailed," it says, glowing and golden, with a grin that's his earliest memory, "but if you're down with Plan J, I could probably help you out with that."

"Holy shit, Julia." He falls forward to wrap himself around her, relief making him light and heavy all at once. "Where did you come from?"

He can feel the face she makes into his good shoulder.

"Well, when a boy and a baby goddess love each other very much —"

" _You know what I mean_." The edge of exasperation is lost in the wet laugh he huffs into her hair, in the way that, for a second, he can breathe in the ozone and sunshine smell of her and forget just how fucked everything is. "How are you here? _Why_ are you here?"

"Because it seemed like you needed me?" She pulls back, gaze flicking from his face to a spot over his shoulder and back again. "I'm still pretty new at this, but there are cries for help, Q, and then there's whatever you've been screaming into the void."

He snorts, sliding his hands down her arms. It's almost comforting, the idea that maybe, instead of failing to make any sort of sense of the vision for the rest of the group, he'd somehow managed to make her come back to them. Almost.

"You didn’t have to… Jules, you're supposed to be off somewhere becoming, you know. An _adult_ goddess."

"Quentin. Chill." She shakes her head, reaching up to brush the hair out of his eyes. "I am exactly where I'm supposed to be."

With his throat closed and his heart full, all he can do is wrap her up again.

"I see how it is," Margo says wryly at his right. "Are you actually the cavalry, or are you just here to give Quentin something else you haven't brought enough of for the rest of the class?"

" _Wow_ ," Jules snorts into his shirt, blinking as she steps back. "Okay."

"I believe what Bambi's trying to say is 'good to see you, Julia, congrats on all the goddesshood.'" Quentin turns in time to catch the tail of end of El's smile, tight and tired, close-mouthed but genuine. "You mentioned something about _helping_?"

Julia cuts her eyes back to Quentin, reaching out to bump a fist against his bicep.

"You tell me," she says. "Just how big was that boulder?"

"Less Indy than Sisyphus," he answers, though she already knows — he can see it in the tilt of her head and the way her lips twitch at the corners, in the _brave face for Q_ she perfected before they'd even hit puberty. _Party trick_ , she'd said. _I just feel things._ As if that was a new development, and not something inherent in her turned incidentally superpowered, something rooted deep and finally stretching toward the sun.

Our Lady of the Tree, indeed.

Feeling isn't explanation, but he's heard and told this cruel joke of a story too many times today, and he's fresh out of energy for anything more than the punchline. "We got a glimpse of the future, and the future is kind of fucked. For us in particular, yeah, but also for magic and pretty much the whole world. Unless we figure out how to use this."

He snags the key between two fingers and lets it hang from his hand, swinging and spinning, at her sight line.

She purses her lips and raises one eyebrow and says, "what, like a decoder ring?" in a way that's only half a question at best, and his shoulders slump in gratitude and exhaustion and sheer, blinding relief.

" _Fuck_ , Jules," he breathes, "I'm just… really glad you're here."

Her face smooths into a familiar smile, soft and crinkly and warm. "Me too."

"Just to clarify," Josh chimes in behind her, "that was a _yes_ on divine intervention?"

The chain snags in Quentin's hair as he pulls it over his head to pile in the center of Julia's open palm. "It's, um, it's Jane's. From the second Fillory book." Her eyes widen but she stays silent for long enough that he starts to ramble blindly on. "It's supposed to show us… well, what we saw, but, you know. In a way that actually makes sense. Except it isn't _working_ , I can't get it to work. I thought… I tried a shared consciousness spell, that's where the magic went. But, I mean. You're here, so. You can guess how that worked out."

She grabs for his flailing hands, her face patient and amused. "It's a locket, Q. May not look much like one, but it's been pretty well established that it's a locket."

He blinks. "Which means… what?"

"Which _means_ ," she says, and it sounds like _duh_ , "we have to _open it._ "

The connection is not one he's ever made, ever needed to, but it makes a strange sort of sense — if there's some other reason why the little key would have been specifically labeled a locket, it's not one he can come up with.

"And you think you can do that," Alice says, not a question in the slightest.

Julia hums her answer, more to the key in her hand than anything. "I think… I think it _wants me_ to."

"To open the magical black hole." Penny blows out a puff of brittle, bitter laughter. "Yeah, that sounds like something you should listen to."

"I'm only back because I listened to _Quentin_ ," Julia says, clenching her jaw when 23 snorts in response.

"Because that's never ended badly for you before."

"For _me_?" She shakes her head. "No. It hasn't."

Penny scowls, sliding his arms across his chest and his eyes to the floor, and Eliot makes a sound that's equal parts exasperated and exhausted. "For the record," he says, "we're _listening to_ the time-bending bitch who actually knows what apocalyptic badness awaits. Let's just check our painful past baggage and focus on unfucking the future at hand, shall we?"

El isn't looking at him, won't, but it doesn't matter — Quentin feels the weight of each word, regardless. He takes a deep breath, feels it drag and rattle behind his ribs.

"So, um. Jules?"

Nodding, she slips the chain back over his head, tucks the key under the edge of his collar to sit flush against his sternum. Her hand falls to the front of his shirt, pressed flat over the key, spread wide over his heart.

"Don't worry," she says, "this won't hurt a bit."

The glow of her god power comes back again, light leaking between her fingers to seep beneath his skin. But it takes a shape, this time — something small and warm at the center of his chest, with tiny teeth and half-moon edges, with an iris of anxious, ancient energy that seems to bore right through him.

"Q?"

The world is still sun-bright at the edges, even with the glow gone, and he blinks up at Eliot and makes himself breathe. "Yeah, I'm. Pretty sure it's open."

"I hope it's fucking open," El answers, "or else your eyes have turned black for shits and giggles." His hand stops its reaching a few inches away, but his tension leaps across the distance to grab Quentin by the throat. "Julia… how safe is this, really? Because you may be a shiny new immortal, but Pinocchio here is barely a real boy."

"Not even," Margo drawls. "That shoulder's still Fillory's finest timber."

Julia shakes her head, but Quentin is quicker to speak. "It's fine, it's — It's like a conduit. I can feel it, the, the _core_ of it. Like Jules found its frequency, and now it's just waiting for something to cross through. Like…" He flexes the fingers at his side, searching for something to sum up the perfect ring of sensation, this strange feeling of a passage into elsewhere. "Like the Stargate."

Eliot blanches, brows raising and eyelids fluttering shut, and Margo's mouth twists with what, knowing her, could be amusement or disgust or some combination of both.

"Would've gone with _portal_ , myself," she says, "but hey, geek's gonna geek. Can we haul this train wreck back on the rails?"

With a final press of her palm Julia's fingers fall away, and she falls back to the other side of the circle, slotting into the space between Kady and Penny. The tug of magic follows her like a string, tied to the hole near his heart that's been hollowed out for the sketch of their future to fill.

"Okay," she says, "take two."

Her hands come up to connect with Penny on one side and Kady on the other, and they flow outward from there to link like a chain, one by one — Kady grabbing Josh's hand while Penny finds Margo's, Margo's hand swallowed in Eliot's as Josh grabs onto Alice. _Dominoes_ , he thinks, and the voice in his head is Jane Chatwin. _Just like dominoes._

The click of connection comes then, a single thread spinning into a spiderweb — not the static buzz of feedback he's felt twice before, but a steady hum in perfect pitch, an extra pulse amplifying his own.

He reaches without conscious thought, latching onto Alice with his left, fingers finding Eliot with his right. The last of his air leaves eight sets of lungs in chorus, in unison, and he floats in the lightheaded space between breaths, magic plucking at each gossamer strand of connection, playing them like chords — Margo's major and Josh's minor, Kady's alto and Penny's bass, Alice's sharp soprano and Julia's steady mezzo and Eliot's rich tenor and his own tremulous treble — until the hum is a symphony of strings.

The strumming solidifies, becomes a single note in eight separate octaves. He can hear his heart like a metronome, feel it hitch and shift to synch up with the others, and the beat of it between his ears sounds like ticking.

There'd been eight trees in the Clock Barrens, set in a circle just like this one. Eight timelines where one of them is still alive.

It's the last thought he has before the crescendo, before the breath rushes back and knocks them clear of each other and the door in his chest shuts up tight.

**Author's Note:**

> Titles (story and chapter) come from Magne Furuholmen, which seemed fitting. You can find me on Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/freneticfloetry). Comments are my catnip, and a huge motivation. Thank you so much for reading!


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